Miami, New Orleans lead the NFL's lowest beer pricesBy Jason Notte, The Street
POSTED: 10/22/2013
These New Orleans Saints fans have plenty to cheer about. They drink some of the cheapest NFL stadium beer in the nation. (Bill Haber/AP)
As an unwritten rule, National Football league teams don't generally do their fans any favors.
As we've mentioned, the NFL has no problem taking billions in tax dollars for its play palaces, hoarding all the money from deals to broadcast games from those gilded facilities, blacking out broadcasts in home markets when fans don't give them a full stadium, hiding behind tax-exempt status to avoid financial responsibility for any of it and using an antitrust agreement to justify all of the above.
That being the case, it pays to throw the disgruntled local fan base a concession every so often. The Jacksonville Jaguars haven't blacked out a game on local television in three years, but the experience left the small-market team's front office so chastened that it's giving away free beer with tickets this year just to avoid the possibility.
If you're over 21, the NFL and its official beer sponsors at Anheuser-Busch want you to come to the game more than ever. After beer prices jumped from an average of 42 cents an ounce in 2011 to 43 cents an ounce last year, they actually sank to roughly 41 cents an ounce this year.
That's still $7 for little more than a pint, but it's one of the few concessions the league is making at its concessions stands for fans feeling otherwise squeezed by ticket prices. With help from Team Marketing Reports Fan Cost Index, we counted down the top-five lowest beer prices in the league:
No. 5. 39 cents per ounce
Team: Minnesota Vikings
Price of a small draft beer: $7.75 for 20 ounces
'Sceidarr', from Crosby, Minn., drinks beer from a horn before the 2010 NFC Championship Game. (David J. Phillips/AP)
It hasn't been an easy couple of years for Vikings fans. The team's quarterback situation is a mess, but few aspects of Vikings fandom are more troubling than the controversy surrounding the new stadium. With the Wilf family of owners hinting at a potential move to Los Angeles, Minnesota put itself on the hook for about $500 million of the proposed $974 million Vikings stadium planned for 2016. That figure was still being negotiated, but negotiations hit a snag when owner Zygi Wilf was found guilty of fraud, racketeering and breach of contract in a New Jersey real estate deal gone bad.
Again, that's a guy the state is entrusting with $500 million in tax dollars. The same guy who basically extorted those tax dollars out of the state by threatening to pull the Vikings out of a place they've called home for more than 52 years.
A $7.75 beer is nobody's idea of a consolation prize, but Vikings fans are making out better on the unit price than they have on any aspect of the Vikes' recent business dealings.
No. 4. 39 cents per ounce
Teams: New England Patriots and Arizona Cardinals
Price of a small draft beer: $7.50 for 20 ounces in New England, $6 for 16 ounces in Arizona
If you were dropped on the Earth three days ago and told to look at these two teams, you might see some similarities. Both eschewed the big-city identities of Boston and Phoenix for more regional, big-tent, suburb-friendly monikers and both have made a Super Bowl appearance in the past five years and lost in close, dramatic fashion.
To just about everyone else, however, there's little tying the Patriots, who have missed the playoffs only five times since 1994, to the Cardinals, who have made the playoffs only three times during that span. Since 1985, the Patriots have been to seven Super Bowls and won three.
The Cardinals, meanwhile, have posted exactly three winning seasons in that span, all after moving to Arizona in 1988.
Arizona fan Chip Acton sips a beer through his facemask during a Super Bowl pregame party in 2009. (Ross D. Franklin/AP)
Cardinals fans have earned their low beer price, especially after ownership raised average ticket prices 17 percent from last season based on just about no merit. Patriots fans, meanwhile, get that low unit price as a tradeoff for paying the highest average ticket price in the land at nearly $118 to watch their perennial favorite.That's on top of an average of $40 for parking in spaces that are often little more than abandoned mud lots or excess gas station space.
Performance, ticket prices, geography: Almost none of it changes what you pay for a beer on game day.
No. 3: 37.5 cents per ounce
Team: Carolina Panthers
Price of a small draft beer: $7.50 for 22 ounces
The $6 for 22 ounces originally reported by TMR would be easily the biggest steal in the league -- if it were so.
Unfortunately, as the Charlotte Observer reported, that's the size of their 12-ounce beer, which adds up to 50 cents an ounce. The larger version, however, is far more of a bonus.
Panthers ownership is hoping their cheap beer softens up fans enough to make them forget that they not only gave owner Jerry Richardson $87.5 million in tax money for renovations to 17-year-old Bank of America Stadium, but only got him to promise that he'd keep the team in town for another six years. Six. That's more than $14.5 million per year, and $116 per Charlotte resident whether they see the Panthers play or not.
Maybe Panthers fans are confident Newton can get the town a Super Bowl ring during that span. If not, maybe their $87.5 million investment will pay off for Los Angeles or London sometime after 2020.
No. 2: 36 cents per ounce
Team: Tampa Bay Buccaneers
Price of a small draft beer: $5.75 for 16 ounces
Fans line up beer bottles during a Vikings/Texans preseason game on Aug. 30, 2012, in Houston. (Pat Sullivan/AP)
Coach Greg Schiano may or may not have leaked confidential drug test information about his ex-quarterback Josh Freeman to the media. He has chafed players including star cornerback Darelle Revis with his aggressive style and drawn fire from both the New York Giants and Arizona Cardinals for having his players dive after the ball when the opposing offense kneels down to run out the clock.
Yet none of that is why Bucs fans deserve one of the cheapest beers in the league. The fact that they've seen just five of the team's 24 home games on local television between 2010 and last year, despite shelling out 100 percent of the costs of $165 million Raymond James Stadium, warrants some cheap suds. As does the news that, at least for this season, that blackout streak is over. Bucs management announced earlier this season that they would send a check to the league if attendance fell below the league's new, optional 85 percent minimum.
That's a big reward for a fan base that's put up with more than its share of insults in the past few years. Some reasonably priced concessions only further salve that wound.
No. 1: 35 cents per ounce
Teams: Miami Dolphins and New Orleans Saints
[b]Price of a small draft beer: $8.50 for 24 ounces in New Orleans, $7 for 20 ounces in Miami
A vender sells beer before an NFL preseason football game between the Packers and the Chiefs, Aug. 30, 2012, in Green Bay, Wis. (Mike Roemer/AP)
That's not a bad price to pay to enjoy a beverage and watch some warm-weather destination football.
In a booze-soaked city such as New Orleans, where the pregame drink options are both reasonable and ample, providing some beer value doesn't hurt. Giving fans a franchise quarterback such as Drew Brees and that 2009 Super Bowl win certainly don't hurt, either.
For Dolphins fans, even that price might be too much to keep them out of the clubs, off the beaches and in the stadium. In the past decade, the Dolphins have posted exactly three winning records. They made the playoffs once, in 2008, and were handily tossed in the first round by the Baltimore Ravens.
With young gun Ryan Tannehill under center, the team's fortune might be changing. But team owner Stephen Ross and the team's sponsors have been shelling out to prevent television blackouts because season-ticket purchases have dwindled from more than 61,000 in 2006 to little more than 40,000 last year.
The message in New Orleans and Miami is one that bars and clubs in both towns should be familiar with: You can ply folks with booze all you'd like, but unless you give them a reason to stay, they'll just bounce to the next place.
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