Tipoff for Syracuse’s first game in the NCAA Tournament is scheduled for just after noon. An off­-campus bar has been full since 11 a.m. By the time the final buzzer sounds, the patrons are nicely buzzed.

Many are legally drunk, according to a group of students in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications who used a BACtrack Breathalyzer to measure their intoxication level.

A student named Pat, who has been drinking since noon, gives his blessing for the test at 3 p.m.

Someone from the group tells Pat to take a breath once the countdown timer reaches two seconds. At the beep, he exhales and blows into the Breathalyzer. Five seconds later, he hears a second beep signaling for him to stop. The results pop up about 10 seconds later — 0.18 blood alcohol level — which is more than double New York state’s legal limit of 0.08 percent.

“Well, this thing really does what it’s supposed to do,” Pat says. “I blew into it and it told me what we all already knew: that I’m drunk. Good thing I’m not driving.”

Over the course of three days and nights, 60 people were voluntarily tested on Marshall Street and nearby bars by the group of students in Newhouse. The goal of the survey was to ask drinkers to predict their blood alcohol content (BAC), and then measure it to get a sense of how often partiers might actually underestimate their levels.

Results revealed that out of the 60 people tested, nearly half had a higher BAC than what they predicted.

Of all people tested, most had a higher BAC than the legal intoxication level of 0.08. A common rule of thumb is to drink no more than one drink an hour to keep levels within reason, but experts agree that there are too many factors at play to make any such guidelines of much use: gender, height and weight, food intake and strength of the drink — especially since the “same” drink can be mixed differently by different people.

Onondaga County Sheriff’s Department Deputy Jason Washo said the accuracy of a Breathalyzer can be skewed depending on a number of factors.

“We have a 20 ­minute observation period. When an individual drinks, they have residual alcohol on their breath, which can give them a higher BAC than they actually have,” Washo said.

This is why Breathalyzers are only used after an individual fails a field sobriety test, Washo added.

“Most of our observations for DWI (driving while intoxicated) are based on visual observations and then the smell of alcohol,” Washo said.

The sobriety test involves a horizontal gaze nystagmus test, the walk­-and-­turn test, and a one-leg stand.

A BAC test is performed if a driver fails these. A driver does have a right to refuse to take the test — something Washo advises against.

“When you sign up for your license in New York state, you’re basically agreeing to take that breath test,” Washo said. “If you do refuse, they read you your DWI (refusal) warnings and explain in the warnings, kind of like your Miranda rights, that your license will most likely be revoked.”

When SU students head out to the bars, they can quickly reach — and exceed — the 0.08 level.

Harry’s bartender Bridget Morgan said she usually has to throw two to three people out of the Crouse Avenue bar every night for having too much.

“There are nights when it’s really bad, and you’re kicking a group of people out, or four to five people out, or something like that,” said Morgan, a senior political science major at SU who’s been bartending since 2013. “It really depends, we joke about, ‘Is it a full moon tonight? What were people doing tonight?’ Because there are some nights when you’re just like, everybody is really aggressive and really rude, and other nights go by without any sort of problems.”

People usually arrive around midnight and start out reasonably polite, Morgan said. But from 1:15 a.m. on, she said customers’ behavior can quickly get annoying.

“My regulars pretty much know how I am, but if new people are really rude to me or misbehaving in the bar … then I just usually yell at them,” she said. “I try to keep everyone in line, because obviously I go out and drink so I know what it’s like, but there are some things where it’s like, ‘It’s OK, you’re drunk, sit down and have some water,’ and then worse times where it’s like, ‘OK, you don’t need to be an A-hole.’”

Morgan said students tend to order more alcohol than they realize. Some of Harry’s larger mixed drinks have four to five shots of alcohol, plus a mixer.

“When people are like, ‘Oh, I’ll have three,’ I’m like, all right, maybe not!” she said, laughing.

This is especially true of the aptly named “Mind Eraser,” which is a layered shot filled with vodka, black raspberry liqueur and soda. Mind Erasers are one of Harry’s most popular drinks. Students may have four to five of them, which Morgan said is the average number of drinks Harry’s customers typically order.

Morgan explained that, generally, people don’t know what’s in their drinks. They don’t know what they’re drinking or how many they’ve had — they only know it tastes good.

When monitoring customers, Morgan said she usually looks for slurred speech, excessive spilling or emotional outbursts. Falling asleep and falling all over the place are also red flags. She said the first step to intervening is serving the customer water. If things escalate, the bouncer is brought in.

Dr. Elizabeth Berry, a clinical psychologist in the chemical dependency treatment services department of Crouse Hospital, said a person’s aim of “drinking to get drunk” often comes from a mixture of peer pressure and social values that emphasize the importance of drinking to have fun.

Berry said most people understand when they’ve reached a certain level of drunkenness and when their body and mind aren’t functioning normally. However, ignorance can also be a large factor when students drink beyond their limits.

“There’s a level of denial,” Berry said. “People like to drink. So they’re not going to admit how drunk they are because they like to drink.”

Only two people tested in the Newhouse Breathalyzer sweeps had a BAC of 0.2 or higher, which is when most people begin to experience blackouts, according to AwareAwakeAlive.org.

Berry said a BAC above 0.2 is still “way too high.” But she was encouraged by the number of students who had some sort of awareness of how intoxicated they were. She credits this to growing trends in alcohol awareness education that are not just about abstinence.

“It’s really the parents, the modeling parents do at home, and the talking parents do at home that’s the most effective — if you do it as a family, if you do it over time, you don’t just sit them down for ‘the talk,’ but it’s an ongoing conversation,” Berry said.

Editor’s Note: Over the past month, The Daily Orange has collaborated with the Department of Newspaper and Online Journalism at Syracuse University on a series of stories relating to alcohol culture on the SU campus. Multiple stories will appear in The D.O. in the coming days.

Published on April 5, 2016 at 11:40 pm

Contact Yonah: ylperlin@syr.edu