How Illinois Fighting Illini Football Fans Can Drink Their Way To Lovie Smith’s Buyout This Fall

Five years ago, Illinois and Purdue were dueling for sole possession of the Big Ten basement. Over the last couple of years, Purdue has taken off. Illinois announced today that they’re going to match the Boilermakers. Not in terms of creating winning programs, mind you, but in terms of selling beer at games.

This gives Fighting Illini fans a perfect opportunity to raise money for the athletic department to ensure that they’re well-stocked to do whatever is necessary with the coaching staff at the end of the season. The math is simple: if you’re an Illini fan at Memorial Stadium this fall, grab a beer before kickoff.

Every time the opponent scores, finish your beer and buy a new one.

Had this program been in place during the Iowa or Penn State games last year, every fan would have purchased ten beers including the initial beer. With a defense that allowed well over 40 points a game in conference play, that would generate a staggering amount of revenue.

If the orange and blue faithful were to follow this one simple rule this fall, the worse the defense performed, the more revenue would be raised for the athletic department. In other words, the more points Lovie’s defense gives up, the bigger the Drinking Illini Buyout Fund gets.

That’s to say nothing of how much more enjoyable something like the 63-0 Iowa debacle would be for those in attendance. Perhaps the fanbase would be a little better at speaking their collective mind. After all, there’s more philosophy in a keg of beer than in all the books in the world.

But from a purely economic standpoint, this is the perfect plan to take advantage of Memorial Stadium’s beer sales this year. After all, 2019 is the payoff year that we’ve all been waiting for, when the results would finally start to count for something. This is the year that it’s finally time for the football team to produce. This is the year where it’s finally going to matter again. I’ve been talking for years about how important 2019 is for the football program. This. Is. It. How will Illinois respond? I’ll direct you to a comment from 2015:

With that in mind, when the defense somehow gets even worse this fall, as long as fans are finishing their beer and buying a new one every time they give up a score, the Fighting Illini faithful can literally drink Lovie Smith away!