For two weeks every June, Omaha becomes the center of the college sports universe. Omaha is an unlikely place to find hallowed ground, but then again, the College World Series is full of improbable traditions.
Take the humble Jell-O Shot, for example.
As we’ve covered here in the past, the Kentucky Derby has the mint julep and The Master’s has pimento cheese. Yet no sporting event has a hallowed food quite like Omaha’s Jell-O Shots. Allow me to explain.
As far as rituals go, it’s a rather new one. Just steps from Charles Schwab Field is Rocco’s Pizza & Cantina, an unassuming watering hole for college baseball fans to frequent before and after games. For years, bartenders thought it would be a good promotion to mix up special shots in the color of whichever team was playing that day. It was a great idea with one huge problem: they became too popular, and mixing, measuring, and serving each shot became taxing on the bar staff. And so, in 2018, Rocco’s instead began to offer Jell-O shots. Florida fans get blue raspberry. Bama fans get red cherry. Notre Dame gets green apple. Simple enough, right?
That first year, the bartenders noticed that Arkansas fans, in particular, were buying lots of Jell-O shots. One night, bartenders decided to keep track of just how many the Hawgs fans were buying. The final tally came out to 800 shots in one night. “I thought just, you know, ‘This is crazy,’” said Rocco’s owner Kevin Culjat.
Then, Mississippi State played.
“I knew a lot of these people would be coming into town,” Culjat said. “So like, I told my wife, ‘Listen, I'm gonna take a little piece of paper. I'm gonna write a flyer up here saying there's a Jell-O shot record out there, just for fun. And it’ll say 800-some shots from the University of Arkansas.’”
“Well, you know,” Culjat continued, “2,000 Jell-O shots later, Mississippi State had the record.”
Sometimes, beautiful traditions need some divine providence to turn the mundane into the sacred. And for the origin story of the Omaha Jell-O shot, that moment came the following year, when Arkansas and Mississippi State both made it to Omaha—again.
By then, Culjat had upgraded his handwritten sign with a proper plaque that declared that Mississippi State fans held the Jell-O Shot record with 2,000. “Arkansas rented the party room on the first day of the tournament,” Culjat remembers, “and between 9 AM and noon, they had already drank 3,000 Jell-O shots. Shattered the record.”
Another strange thing started to happen: all week long, the phones kept ringing. Callers, from all over the country, wanted to know: who was winning the Jell-O Shot tournament? Culjat found a white board to start a real-time tally, listing each team and the number of Jell-O Shots they had consumed over the course of the week. Then he started a Twitter account to share updates.
The results are…shall we say, staggering.
LSU won the competition last year. In two weeks, Tiger fans downed a whopping 68,888 Jell-O Shots. Geaux Tigahs, baby.
It took a Tiger army to set that record—and like all great college sports, it also took some help from a booster. One day, Culjat was tending bar when he heard whispers that someone wanted to place a big order. Really big. It was Raising Cane’s founder Todd Graves, an LSU alum. He wanted to buy 6,000 shots. "You know what, man? I started from nothing," Graves said. "I had to commercial fish in Alaska to start my first restaurant…You work hard and become successful, and then you're able to buy all these LSU fans a shot. It feels pretty cool.”
Each shot costs $5, $2 of which is donated to local food banks. Last year, Rocco’s donated $142,464 after the World Series. They’ve also honed in the manufacturing process. Culjat partnered with a third-party company that brings Jell-O shot-making machines to Omaha for the two weeks of the World Series. They have four machines that can crank out 100 Jell-O shots every four minutes, or 7,000 shots every day. “They'll make Jell-O shots all night,” Culjat said.
So far this year, all signs are that it will be another record-setting season. Tennessee is in the lead, with bright orange shots, breaking the Thursday record by buying 348 shots. But as the tournament continues and the weekend goes on, those numbers will surely sky rocket.
So keep checking the Twitter tracker. The baseball isn’t the only important tournament happening in Omaha this week.
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