While American Football has surpassed baseball on the totem pole and carved itself out a niche as this country's favorite pastime, one thing Americans seem to enjoy just as much as sitting back and watching a football game is having a drink. Best case scenario, you can sit back and watch a football game while having a drink, a time-honored tradition that sports fans have enjoyed for decades now.
In fact, having a cold one during a game has become a business unto itself. The nation's biggest brewing companies will spend millions of dollars on advertising every Sunday afternoon, and fans spend probably nearly as much on drinks inside stadiums all across the country. Bradley Cooper is fighting the good fight, trying to show everyone that 'Football is for Food,' but nobody needs to be convinced that the most popular sport in the country and alcohol go hand-in-hand.
But this raises an interesting question... which fanbases are drinking the most on gameday? Well, an online study conducted by Research Without Barriers polled 3,058 U.S. NFL fans before the season began, asking questions about their gameday drinking habits, and the results show that Texans fans are among the booziest out there.
Per The Action Network, not only do 67 percent of Texans fans drink pregame, at an 80 percent clip, fans in Houston are the most likely to drink during the game at NRG Stadium as well. Only six teams -- the Texans, Los Angeles Chargers, Atlanta Falcons, Miami Dolphins, New York Giants and Buffalo Bills -- hit the 70 percent mark.
So what does this tell us? Well, to be honest, I'm not totally sure. I was expecting to stumble upon some sort of trend, but my simple brain couldn't find one. The Texans, Chargers, Falcons and Bills have all never won a Super Bowl. Could that prompt their fans to drink more? Perhaps, but the Giants have won two in the last 20 years, so that doesn't necessarily check out. There are no geographic/regional ties, nor is there a correlation of success -- or lack thereof -- the previous season having anything to do with the drink totals.
According to Rory Vitale of The Big Lead, the cheapest beers around the league can be bought in Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit and Minnesota, yet Bengals, Browns, Lions and Vikings fans rank 30th, 25th, 24th and 14th respectively among in-stadium drinkers, so that rules that out.
In the end, the only thing I could think of to explain these polls results is this... they say that everything is bigger in Texas, and evidently, that includes the desire to get a little tipsy while watching a football game.