Stadium Ban on Alcohol at College Games Weighed : Crowd control: Action is considered at Jack Murphy facility after rash of fights during UCLA-San Diego State contest this week.

Officials at San Diego’s Jack Murphy Stadium said Friday they might be forced to ban alcohol during college football games in the wake of fights that lasted throughout the second half of the UCLA-San Diego State game Thursday night.

Stadium manager Bill Wilson called it “the most continuous battleground I’ve seen” in eight years on the job. Wilson said stadium and city officials may now be forced to place a ban on alcohol, at least during college football games.

The problems started in the third quarter of a game won by UCLA, 37-12, and played before a crowd of 37,333 and a national television audience. By the end of the action, San Diego police had had 52 “contacts” with fans who were facing off or fighting.

Two fans were held in County Jail, 17 were issued misdemeanor citations, and many more were taken to detoxification areas for public drunkenness or ejected, said San Diego Police Sgt. Bob Nunley, who oversees stadium events.

“Virtually all the contacts were alcohol-related,” said Nunley, who called it “as bad as any Chargers-Raiders game, and those are usually terrible for us.”

Two of those involved were male “streakers,” who surprised the crowd with a nude sprint down the length of the field at halftime. Nunley said a third streaker was arrested early in the third quarter.

The injured included one student who suffered severe neck pain and was treated at Sharp Memorial Hospital and released. His attacker remains in County Jail on suspicion of felony battery, Nunley said.

Most of the fights broke out among San Diego State students in the school’s section. Brawling also spilled onto the field and into the plaza levels on the stadium’s north side.

Peter Hayes, the president of Pro-Tect Professional Services, which handles security at San Diego State games, described Thursday as the worst night in the history of the stadium. He said the fighting started when “expected unruliness and pranks gave way to combativeness, with a lot of people swinging and getting hurt.”

Nunley said his job would be much easier with a ban on alcohol during college games, but the school’s athletic director, Fred Miller, said Friday he wants “most of all” to avoid what he called a knee-jerk solution.

“It really isn’t the sale of beer in the stadium, as much as it is students drinking or getting drunk before the game,” Miller said. “We’ve walked this road before. Even if we shut down all the taps, some students would still find a way to drink to excess.”

Miller said that last year the university and stadium joined forces to restrict the use of kegs at tailgate parties in the parking lot. Inside the stadium, no beer is sold after the start of the fourth quarter, each student is limited to purchasing one beer at a time and all students must show identification.

“But it hasn’t solved the problem,” Miller said. “I’m frustrated, but I want only a long-term solution. So, we’re all going to put our heads together and find a way out of this.”

Pro-Tect’s Hayes said Thursday’s brawl was “worse than when UCLA came here two years ago, and we had big problems then.”

“The entire area,” he added, “was like a war zone. Our guys got pelted with food, trash, beer. . . . They were cursed at and called names, and four of (the 240 members of Hayes’ staff) told me today they were quitting, fed up. They were finished with the Aztecs forever.”

Hayes and others blamed the fracas on San Diego State for selling about 13,000 student tickets--available at $1 each, with the appropriate school card--in sections that have a capacity of only 8,000.

Hayes advocated expulsion for students arrested for fighting, and Miller said that, while “that isn’t my decision to make,” he intends to argue for more stringent measures on the part of school administrators.

“It presents a very real problem, a serious image problem, because we are hoping to attract families,” he said. “That’s why we’ve moved our kickoffs from 7:30 (p.m.) to 7 to 6. We’ve tried to restrict students to their own sections, but regardless of where they occur, fights are a big turn-off.”

Times staff writer Scott Miller contributed to this story.