Op-Ed: Dr. Pepper’s halftime blunder further erodes public’s trust in Big Soda

Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium is covered by a dome. But that couldn’t stop boos from raining onto the field at halftime of last week’s SEC Championship football game between LSU and Georgia.

Dr. Pepper again hosted its annual halftime challenge in which two college students compete for $100,000 in tuition, which these days covers half a semester and a cinnamon raisin bagel from the campus coffee shop. Each contestant had one minute to throw as many footballs as possible into a hole cut out of an oversized Dr. Pepper can.

After one minute of tosses, the two students were tied. That initiated a 15-second overtime period, after which the score remained tied. At this point, despite the deadlocked score, one of the competitors, Reagan Whitaker of Baylor University, began jumping and screaming in jubilation.

Whitaker had just won, and she knew it. She was announced the winner over the loudspeakers, and that is when the boos came pouring down from the bleachers. It was quickly evident that the fans were not as upset with who had won, but rather how she had won.

Apparently, Whitaker had won based on a tie-breaking contest held the day before, presumably in an empty stadium and with no cameras rolling. Instead of, say, adding another 15 seconds to the clock to crown a victor on the field, the winner had been determined behind the scenes, out of sight. “They did the same thing to me,” Donald Trump said somewhere, probably.

From my recliner some 560 miles north, I expressed as much outrage as I could muster. Which is to say I sat up for a moment, held out my arms in that confused sort of way and said, “What?!” Then I slowly descended back from whence I came, readjusting my blanket into its most effective position.

Just imagine: Ohio State beat Miami in the 2003 National Championship in double overtime. But what if the referee had stood at midfield following the first OT and proclaimed, “The game is over. The Miami Hurricanes are the winners because their tailback ran a faster 40-yard-dash during practice yesterday. Please drive home safely.”

I’m being a bit dramatic, you say? Well, keep in mind that by this point my remote control had either nestled deep into the cushion or had fallen all the way to the floor out of reach. And I was not about to dive in after it. So watching a couple college girls shotput footballs into giant pop cans was the best sport available to me at that time. And it proved awfully entertaining, too, until the debacle at the end.

A spokeswoman for Dr. Pepper later explained why the competition was cut short. She said that someone had forgotten to completely empty the cans prior to wheeling them onto the field. The footballs that had already been thrown into them landed in the pool of Dr. Pepper and obviously dissolved on impact. The company feared that continuing the contest would risk them running out of footballs. And remember, LSU and Georgia still had to play the second half.

I accept this explanation as it is the only one that makes sense to me. Nonetheless, it indicates a level of carelessness by the Dr. Pepper corporation that will only continue to erode the public’s trust in Big Soda.

We must demand better from our beloved multibillion-dollar corn syrup peddlers. Should we refuse to publicly condemn such acts of negligence, then we frankly deserve to live in a land of imaginary overtimes amid puddles of leathery mush formerly known as footballs.

This story was originally published December 20, 2022.