With the legal drinking age at 21 years old, it makes it very difficult for schools to start selling alcohol at collegiate sporting events.

One big reason for this non-selling of alcohol is because of the presence of college students at the games, most of whom are underage and cannot drink at all.

“There is a family environment when you go to a college sporting event,” Daniel Stephens, a freshman here at Stony Brook said. “It’s not supposed to be as rowdy and crazy as a professional sporting event.”

The NCAA sporting events would beg to differ.

When there are such occasions as people confronting coaches, like what happened on Thursday night at the Hawaii-UCSB basketball game.

Blame it on security as much as you want, there must have been some alcohol in the system for a student to do something as crazy as that.

The problem is, how much money are they losing when they don’t sell alcohol at games?

For example, Omaha, Nebraska hosts the College World Series for Baseball every year and they do not sell any at that event. Now, they do not have a choice, but they also are losing out on a boatload of money.

Now that’s great for Omaha. There is nothing going against them. It’s great that they can rake in that kind of money during a week-long event like this.

But think about a college football game, with 90,000-plus filling the stands. There’s a lot of money to be made in that one game.

Just for example, say 50,000 people buy one beer and say they’re $5 each for easy math.

That’s $250,000 in one home game.

There are six home games in a season.

That’s $1.5 million that can go to booster clubs, or athletic scholarships, stadium improvements, etc.

Now, there is a downside to all of this and it’s the violence that can arise from alcohol.

Whether it’s the students or the adults, there is always that increased risk of violence.

One such act of violence occurred after an Indianapolis Colts football game, in which 12-year-old Tierra Rae Pierson and her cousin January Canada were run over by Trenton Gaff in his SUV.

In his system were five beers, which was much more alcohol than should have been served to Gaff that day.

The question is now, should the policies be changed? “I think the policies already in place seem to work quite well,” Chris Leelum, also a freshman at Stony Brook said.

“There are always some drunk dudes at the game but the high prices and amount limitations help to reduce alcohol related problems.”

The problems that arise from alcohol are just going to happen. The real problem that concession and stadium managers are going to have to solve is managing it.