College Sports No Place for Booze Ads, Says Former Coach

by Jim Brown
December 1, 2003

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(AgapePress) - One of the most successful college football coaches of all time is tackling the problem of underage drinking.

Former University of Nebraska coach Tom Osborne is backing a new campaign to get college sports to dump beer ads targeted at young students and fans. Now a U.S. congressman representing the Cornhusker State, Osborne is promoting a national initiative to rid televised college sports of alcohol advertising. Specifically, he is calling on athletic conferences and the NCAA to stop taking money from those advertisers.

The former coach says collegiate athletics have become too commercialized and are moving more and more in the direction of professional sports.

"There's a point where you draw the line, and you say there's a matter of principle here," the congressman says. "The number-one social problem on the college campus, on the high school campus, [and] on the junior high campus is alcohol consumption -- and if you do away with underage drinking, you probably do away with eighty to ninety percent of the date rapes, the assaults, [and] the really ugly stuff that happens on the college and the high school campus."

As a coach, Osborne says he dealt sternly with his players on the issue of alcohol consumption, but also encouraged them to abstain on behalf of the team. Estimating that the typical college student goes out drinking two or three times a week, Osborne extolled to his players the benefits of refusing to follow that pattern.

"We told them ... that [if they] stayed out of the bars and away from alcohol on Tuesday night, Thursday night, and Saturday night, [they're] going to practice better, [they're] going to have more rest, [their] focus is going to be better, and [they're] going to be five percent or ten percent better football team," he says.

Osborne says the best teams he coached voted as a team to abstain from alcohol and enforced that decision internally.