“You’re Forced to Snort Your Face Off.” How Early Kickoffs Became College Football’s Biggest Buzzkill

By Laine Higgins, The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 22, 2024

[Note: This is a parody of the article titled “You’re Forced to Binge Your Butt Off. How Early Kickoffs Became College Football’s Biggest Buzzkill” by Laine Higgins, originally published in the WSJ. Alcohol is a drug, but we often glamorize its use in ways we’d never accept with other substances. Especially in cultural norms like sports tailgating, we normalize and celebrate it to an absurd degree. To highlight this, I’ve rewritten a Wall Street Journal article about college football tailgating, replacing mentions of alcohol with other drugs. It’s unsettling — and that’s the point. I mean, I love college football, but this article clearly shows how little focus there is on “moderate” drinking. Whatever that actually means.]

This has been a season for the ages for Indiana University’s football team. The Hoosiers are undefeated, have eclipsed 10 wins for the first time in their history, and have a chance to book a spot in the Big Ten championship game and possibly the College Football Playoff. For the team’s long-suffering followers, this weekend’s marquee showdown at Ohio State should be the best of times. There’s just one problem: The game will actually take place at the worst of times. Kickoff on Saturday is set for 12 p.m. ET, which counts as unsportsmanlike conduct for fans who like to tailgate with a bump or five before the big game.

“It sucks,” said a sophomore at Indiana studying finance. “Our game should have been a night game.”

In a sport that is defined by its traditions, there may be no ritual more sacred than the time-honored practice of getting completely zooted before a big game. Tailgating is a time for fans to gather, grill, and, of course, enjoy a few lines of cocaine before heading into the stadium. But with the rise of noon kickoffs, fans are finding it harder to fit in their pre-game rituals, including passing around pills or enjoying LSD-infused beverages in the parking lot.

But fans at some of the biggest schools in the country say they’re being prevented from sniffing lines by the growing scourge of noon kickoffs. Even fan bases who can’t agree on much of anything are of the same mind when it comes to 12 p.m. starts: They’re a giant buzzkill.

“The atmosphere is remarkably different,” said a Louisiana State fan who cooks for upward of 60 people for every Tigers home game. “People are obviously a little more rowdy for a night game.”

Some fans are only waking up to the situation now. For Ohio State, Saturday’s clash with Indiana marks the team’s sixth straight noon kickoff, which amounts to half of the entire regular season.

“That is absurd,” said an Ohio State fan from Cleveland.

The early kickoffs are particularly tough to swallow for fans on the West Coast. This Ohio State fan, a lifelong Buckeye who now lives in Anaheim, Calif., has been forced to switch up his pregame routine to account for the 9 a.m. local start time. Instead of sniffing a line or two before kickoff, he often performs household chores instead. “I’ve got a wife, I’ve got a dog, I gotta take care of things,” he said.

To anyone who follows college football, it will come as no surprise to learn that the reason for these early starts is the same one behind almost everything that happens in the game these days: television. The Big Ten and the Southeastern Conference have broadcast deals with different networks, and the SEC’s contract with ESPN saves its best games for the 3:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. windows. To avoid competing for eyeballs, Fox went all in on televising Big Ten games at noon.

It just so happened that this change coincided with a top-heavy year in the Big Ten — four of the top five teams in the country are from the conference — which moved a bunch of blockbuster games up to a time when most people are still sipping their morning coffee or popping their first pill.

For veteran tailgaters, a noon kickoff doesn’t mean no “partying” before the big game. It simply means earlier and faster indulging. That’s the case for a Clemson fan who lives in Raleigh, N.C., and has road-tripped to 18 games in 14 different stadiums across the South in the past two seasons. The biggest logistical challenge during that span, it turns out, was planning the pregame schedule.

“You’re forced into binge-snorting your butt off,” he said. For noon games, he starts the day with a microdose of LSD or a quick puff of something stronger around 8 a.m. “The spirit is willing, but the body is weak.”

The mere idea of a daytime game is akin to sacrilege on some campuses like LSU. It makes for some entertaining people-watching.

“It’s really funny watching coked-up dads but also coked-up college students try to make things on a grill,” said an Indiana student. “The amount of focus that it takes when you’re not all there to make a pancake is hilarious.”

For universities that don’t often have games deemed worthy of prime-time viewing, fans are used to early kickoffs and know to make the most of their Saturday mornings.

“We know we’re going to get our butts kicked,” explained a Wisconsin alum who lives in Chicago. “Whatever fun we’re going to have, we wanna have right now.”

The Wisconsin alum and his wife drove up the night before to attend the Badgers’ game against Alabama in September that kicked off at 11 a.m. local time. Even with the three-hour drive out of the way, they had to get up before dawn to complete their game-day routine of knocking back MDMA tablets and securing a loaf of spicy cheese bread from the Dane County Farmers’ Market.

“It genuinely was like a 6 a.m. wake-up,” he said. “Like, this is just horrible.”

The mere idea of a daytime game is akin to sacrilege on some campuses like LSU, whose Tiger Stadium has hosted just four games against SEC opponents in the early window, which begins at 11 a.m. local time, since 2000.

“I’m thankful we don’t have early kicks,” said an LSU fan and a retired accountant from New Orleans. Even for evening games, his wife’s edible gummies usually come out before noon. Asked what fans of the Bayou Bengals might do if their rivalry game against Alabama were ever moved to the first kickoff slot, he just said, “Lord knows.”

One fan offered a more detailed prediction. “You would have fans rioting,” he said.

LSU games so often kick off at night for the same reason Ohio State is playing at noon: when they’re winning, both programs are eyeball magnets for television. As a result, early kickoffs have become so routine at Ohio State this fall that fans are forming new habits.

“My cocaine intake during games has gone down significantly,” one Ohio State fan said, “while my MDMA and mushroom microdosing has gone up.”