PubClub Football Season Survival Guide: Win Or Lose We Booze

How To Make It Through Games If Your Team Is A Winner Or A Loser

Football season is a time to watch your team and either celebrate or cry into your beer. But when it comes to drinking, follow the same advice coaches give their players: have a 24-hour rule. Don’t let your game-day drinking carry over into the next day with a massive hangover. Here are PubClub’s tips for surviving a football game win or lose.

By Kevin Wilkerson, Editor & Publisher, PubClub.com

Few things in life evoke passion in people like sports. Our teams are like mental magnets, drawing us in to watch them no matter how good or bad they are in any particular season. And with that often comes having a few beers or cocktails. Sports bars, especially ones catering to specific teams, are big business and fans like to brag that their team has the best tailgate party.

But to really enjoy the game, you have to survive the experience. I have a lot of knowledge in this area, so here’s my survival guide to watching football games, whether it’s college football or the NFL. And heck, it works for you European soccer fans, too.

This guide applies whether you’re at home, at a sports bar with other fans of your team or at the game.

Start Slow – It’s A Long Game

As the bartenders at the bar where I go to watch my alma mater’s game what I drink before and during the first half of a game. They will tell you I have water along with my beers. Almost one-for-one, in fact. Things change after halftime because that’s when games are often decided, and I want to be “fresh” for those key moments, whether they are ones of celebration or of sorrow.

Avoid Shots In The First Half

Definitely don’t do shots in the first half. If you want to know why, then do not take this advice and you will learn why pretty quickly.

Eat Before And/Or During The Game

With all the whacky kickoff times now, especially in college football, it’s hard to plan your eating around the game.  I always try and eat first and then maybe add to it at some point during or pretty soon after the game. If you’re like me and get nervous in tight contests going down to the wire then the last thing on my mind is having a burger or whatever. Keep this in mind when doing your eating planning – think ahead is the key here!

Don’t Be The Guy Who Thinks He Can Drink Like He Did In College

Know your limits.

Picking Up The Pace In The Second Half

I tend to pick up my drinking pace in the second half of games. The water is set aside and my pace of beer consumption increases with the intensity of the game. By the end, no matter the outcome, I live the PubClub cheer of “Win or Lose, We Booze!”

How To Survive A Game If You Have A Winning Team

I have a lot of experience here because the team (college) I follow has won more National Championships than any other school and has had the two most successful coaches of all time. So most of the time, it’s a celebration and I treat the games that way. I generally don’t do shots until after the game and once a year have a cigar (fans of two teams will get the reference) but I like to leave a little in the party tank to go out that night. When you have a winning team, drinking is an enhancement to the game-watching experience, not a drown-your-sorrows time.

How To Survive A Game If Your Team Sucks

Now, on the other hand, if you’re a fan of, say, the Miami Dolphins, Las Vegas Raiders, Arkansas Razorbacks, Arizona Wildcats or (heaven forbid) Rutgers Scarlet Knights; a traditional power that’s no longer any good (Florida State comes immediately to mind); or, worse yet, a team that just can’t quite seem to get it right despite having all the elements but continually disappoints (Texas A&M, Auburn), then you must take a different approach.

Based on watching friends of those and other teams, apparently the strategy is to forget everything I’ve mentioned above. It’s not so much about keeping your wits about you as surviving the mental anguish of another losing season. I have first-hand knowledge here because a friend is a fan of both the Dolphins and the Florida Gators.

Drink before the game. Drink during the game. Do shots. Drink until the screen is blurry and you can’t tell how bad your team is losing. My friend starts out slowly by sipping his drink and by the end of the first quarter ore so, he’s ordering doubles. And then tall doubles. Of course, I’m not actually recommending you drink until the screen is blurry but know your limits and don’t overdo it. You get the point.

Now of course, my biggest advice would be to not watch the games at all. Were I a fan of the Dolphins (or Chargers, another perennially disappointing team), I would go to the beach. It would be too frustrating to watch. But that’s not how the mentality of sports fans works. My friend watches every play of every Dolphins game, no matter how painful it is to him. For every “oh geez!,” he takes another drink.

Win or Lose, We Booze, indeed.

Kevin Wilkerson is the founder of PubClub.com, an award-winning journalist and nightlife expert who has covered destinations, events and nightlife for more than two decades. While working as a newspaper reporter, he received an Associated Press award for investigative journalism.