Alex Boone Is The Wilt Chamberlain Of Beer

The internet is a-tizzy over this passage from the Dayton Daily News on sophomore OSU tackle Alex Boone:

Boone, a sophomore starter and former Parade All-American, said he was routinely downing 30 to 40 beers per day, a pattern of bingeing that began in high school and escalated when he arrived at OSU.

((Debatably) interesting usage note: "bingeing" and "binging" are locked in a war for supremacy that "binging" is winning via Google hit, 435k to 356k. If the word that doesn't look viciously misspelled is already more commonly used, why not drop the "e" altogether? As a reader my first instinct there is typo; the second is linguistic death via outdated style guide.)

And no wonder since -- estimating conservatively by pegging his average at, say, 32 and giving him 40 or 50 days off per year for Christmas, Lent, and days when Boone was so drunk from the night before he slept for 30 hours -- over the past two years Boone has consumed approximately 20,000 beers. That's approximately 1,875 gallons, enough to drown a small Vietnamese village. Since Budwesier is 5% alcohol by weight, Boone has consumed 94 gallons of alcohol alone over the past two years.

But wait! There's more! At 140 calories per beer, that's a staggering 280,000 calories; at 3500 calories per pound, Alex Boone has ingested 800 pounds worth of beer in the past two years. Alex Boone would not exist if he did not drink beer. He would be -450 pounds.

Or maybe the "30-40" estimate is wildly unrealistic, but that's no fun at all.