Can We Measure Fan Loyalty By Looking at Disconnect Between NFL On-Field and Financial Performance?

One day in the late aughts, I walked into a grocery store the day after the San Jose Sharks had lost in the Stanley Cup finals. I passed a guy walking out with a Sharks jersey on, who reacted well to my statement that today, we can tell who the real Sharks fans are. After our short exchange I thought: presumably a fan wants their team to win right? In economic terms, fans identity with teams to the extent that they win and increase prestige. Could it be that we can define "fanbase loyalty" as the irrational "price inelasticity" shown by some fans or entire fanbases, as this fellow was doing? (More here on loyalty as irrationality, vs the psychopathy of casual fandom. If you're not offended by this post, you're likely a fellow psychopath. Welcome.)

Of course I recognize how naive it is to get upset that money influences professional sports. Indeed it's really irritating when people cry about their favorite sports stars signing with another team for (gasp!) more money. But if you count yourself as a sports fan, should it NOT be about better games? You as a sports fan want to see good games, and don't care about the league making money, right? (Seinfeld said that really, sports fans are cheering for clothing; I think really they're cheering for market sizes and marketing executives. Inspiring!)

METHODS: To measure the impact of NFL team performance on their financial performance, I took as my inputs the CHANGE in performance in the 2019 and 2020 seasons, both in terms of win record (ties count as half a win) and Elo rating per 538. I compared that to CHANGE in team valuation and total revenues in both 5/2020 (which reflects the 2019 season) and 12/2020 (which reflects the 2020 season.) Notes on methodology - using the CHANGE in quantities has the benefit of providing an internal control for market size, stadium size, local sports susceptibility, etc. and things like inflation and COVID apply to all teams. (Perhaps not equally - the more athletically successful the team, the more revenue they get from stadium sales - more on this later.) Sources for this data below. (Side note, I found three articles in Forbes and Yahoo claiming to list franchise value, but oddly they all gave the same numbers in August 2019, September 2020, and December 2020 - so I used the 18 to 19 changes assuming that reflected performance during the 2018 season.

RESULTS: Comparing team performance measured by Elo with valuation, there was a very weak positive correspondence (improving Elo means improving revenue) with R^2 of 0.0827; no clear outliers.

The same could be said for Elo and revenues, with an even weaker R^2 of 0.029. Taking out 3 apparent outliers did not improve this.

Using the lower granularity, more context (league) dependent measure of win record, the absolute change in number of games won from 2018-2019 was a better fit at R^2=0.1959 (more absolute wins, better valuation) but there was essentially no relationship with revenues - which is a better reflection of fan engagement. There was a similar but slightly weaker result using the input of improvement in record compared to last year's number of wins* against valuation improvement (R^2 of 0.116), and essentially no relationship between this record-improvement statistic and revenues. Again, fans don't care whether the teams win - at least not in a way that affects their spending the following year.

Of note, the Chargers and Rams are new teams so we might expect them to be off-trend, that is with revenues increasing regardless of record, and that's the case - but Indianapolis has no such story and is the next-most off-trend in terms of "better revenues despite getting worse."

*(Reasoning for trying this statistic instead of absolute increase in wins - is the fan impact of a team going from 8 to 10 wins more like going from 6 to 8 wins, or from 4 to 5?)

(I also wanted to compare performance to Nielsen ratings but couldn't find a good data source - and even if I had raw viewers per game, there's the methodological question of how to credit the teams.)

A loyalty index for each team would require tracking the relationship betweeen "worsening athletic performance" against revenue improvement over some period of years. Although I stated above that revenues is a more immediately sensitive indicator of fan engagement, over time one assumes that a constantly losing team MUST lose value - so as a proxy, I looked at current valuation against the 2010-2018 W/L %. Again, the better you play, the higher tha valuation, with an R^2 of 0.0739. Dallas is a major outlier here, though removing them does not make a major differencein the fit. I think Dallas's "inelasticity" (the irrational exuberance and/or broadness of its fanbase) is especially impressive when you consider it's not exactly in a population center (see NFL loyalty map here) - it's not just benefiting from a big market like the Giants.


STADIUM REVENUES AS A PROXY FOR TEAM VALUE AND FAN LOYALTY

NFL teams vary in the amount of their income they get from stadium revenues. Interestingly the graph of percentage of revenues coming from stadium events against win-loss % from 2010-2018 looks very much like the graph for absolute valuation. Again, the Cowboys are way off trend, getting almost 2/3 of their revenue from game days. One imagines NFL executives use people showing up in person as a proxy for team sustainability. One shudders to think of the price of a beer.


WHAT IS THE NFL REALLY MAXIMIZING?

Profit, and sustainability over time. Fairness and exciting games are merely a means to that end. That's obvious - businesses focus on profit - but fans are often loathe to think of their tribe as a business in this way. Yet it's obviously true. The coefficient of variation for Elo rating is 31 and 49 times more than valuation change and revenue change, respectively. And profit sharing, a draft system based on performance, and lack of free agency are all things trying to keep this balance. (In much the same way that college football's bizarre insistence on equally bizarre preseason rankings is really just a way of deceptively seeding high-ticket-sales legacy teams into bowl games. Always think about the money. The games are just a vehicle for making money.

DISCUSSION

There is little connection from season to season between a team's performance and a fan's loyalty, as measured by annual revenues.

Over the longer-term, there is some connection betweem a team's performance, judging by stadium revenues and (more distantly overall franchise valuation) against performance for almost a whole decade. This does appear to differ between franchises, but measuring this is beyond the scope of this post.

Darwin wrote a whole book called On the Origin of Species and of many questions he did answer in that book, that was one he did not. So don't judge.


SOURCES

Revenue by franchise reflecting 2019 season (Aug 2019) here Revenue by franchise reflecting 2020 season (mid-Dec 2019) here Franchise valuations reflecting changes after 2019 season (Sept 2020) here 2010-2018 win-loss average here Elo ratings at fivethirtyeight.com

How to Measure Coaches

In college football, the "winningest" (coach with most wins) is a stupid statistic. It's much more a measure of quantity, not quality. If you coach a long time, even if you suck, you have a better shot at being winningest than a younger high-quality coach. It's a participation trophy.

What matters is your percentage of wins, right? Yes - but it's also true that teams differ in the strength of their recruiting. What I didn't know until I read this article at watchstadium.com is that the strength of each incoming class is measured and ranked, just like teams are. Not surprisingly, there's a relationship: the better your incoming class, the more your team wins.

But it's not an absolute relationship (otherwise, why play the season out?) So if we compare class quality against the final record, this gives us a good way to measure the strength of coaching. For coaches, your input is the quality of your players, and your output is your win-loss record. Coaching is converting talent into wins. That's what you have control over. Not the strength of the rest of your conference, not how screwed up the ranking polls and CFP committee are. (A committee to determine who gets into the playoff? Ever wonder why they don't just use a transparent formula? It's so the bowls make more money. It only has to do with how good the teams are to the extent that if it's too obvious they're actually maximizing for revenue, people will spend less on bowls.)

So if a coach consistently wins less often than the strength of his recruiting class predicts, he's screwing up. If he ends up winning more often than the recruiting class predicts, he's taking silver and and turning it into gold, and he's a good coach.

The article I'm linking to shows scatter plots of programs from the Power Five, plotting number of wins from 2015 through 2018 against average incoming class quality rank for the same period. They don't give an r-value, but the curve does look sigmoidal. This is interesting, because sigmoidal curves often suggest network behavior, and the output here (number of wins) for each team is dependent on other teams. They also point out the relationship is weaker in basketball for a number of reasons including transfers.

On the plot below, the further above the line, the better the coaching. Bottom line: Mike Leach at Washington State is the best coach in the Power 5, with his team finishing 6 wins higher during 2015-18 than would be expected based on his recruiting class. Paul Chryst at Wisconsin, Kirk Ferentz at Iowa, and Dave Doeren at NC State, all tie for second best coach in the Power 5, finishing on average 5 wins higher than their recruiting classes. These are the coaches who are converting talent into wins most effectively.

Which coaches waste the talent they bring in? UNC and Maryland (6 wins lower), along with Nebraska and Texas (5 wins lower.) The full list is available at the article.

For Pennsylvanians: Paterno's Record vs Engle and Franklin

November 2011 felt very much like Pennsylvania's own 9/11, especially to someone for whom Penn State was the closest thing to a religion that they were raised with. Nowadays my relationship to PSU football is like a lapsed Catholic. Sure I don't really follow the season or know the players, but I go once a year and went to the Rose Bowl two years ago - like a Christmas-and-Easter Christian I guess. And just like a Christmas-and-Easter Christian, don't you dare tell me I'm not really a fan! I just follow Penn State in my own way. In my heart!

You can't bring up Paterno without addressing the Sandusky scandal, or make people wonder why you're not addressing the Sandusky scandal. That's completely appropriate. This is a game - a game, like dodgeball - and kids' lives are infinitely more important than guys running around with a ball. Fair enough. Joe knew, and he could've been a hero by immediately going to the police, but he thought that an entertainment group (which is what all sports teams are, period, end of discussion) had an internal moral system that was more important than criminal justice. If there were another school sports team, and one of the assistant coaches was molesting kids, and the head coach not only knew about it but actively discouraged efforts to take it to the police - would you want your kid playing on that coach's team?

Without further ado: as I implied, Paterno is deified as a coach. Is he really that much greater than anyone else? Let's look at the numbers (and by the way, I expect some people to get irrationally upset that I'm daring to do something so brazen as to actually evaluate a coach's performance by numbers - much like religious people don't want the history of their holy text scrutinized too much. "It's just true! Now stop it and don't worry so much about how it was written!") To be honest, part of my motivation here is that I like Franklin - for one thing, instead of Joe's arrogant "I won't run up the score" position, Franklin realizes that his job is to increase Penn State's ranking, and that means run up the score when possible, given the (stupid) college ranking system. I always thought Paterno's take was selfish more than principled, and it certainly cost Penn State ranking spots and revenues (I may write a post about this later), which tends to be what pro-athletics people use to justify the distracting influence of football programs on the colleges that host them. Also, Franklin once coached at good old Kutztown University in old Berks County!

	Engle	Paterno	Franklin
Win %	66.7	74.4	67.9
% Winning Seasons	93.8	90.3	100
Longest win streak	15	21	4
% bowl seasons[2]	25	82	100
% bowl wins	75	64.9	50
% AP ranked seasons	31.3	51.6	50
final AP, when ranked[3]	14.8	8.7	7.5

[1] Note, "longest win streak" means longest streak of winning seasons. A season has to have more wins than losses to be a winning season.

[2] Since # of bowls has increased without a concomitant increase in # of teams, if the team remains the same, it would get higher as time goes on. Case in point, in 2014 PSU won the Pinstripe Bowl but was still un-ranked!

[3] I don't know if there are historical rankings beyond the top 25, which would give a more accurate picture (and I could just use that to give a picture of team quality instead of this and the previous category.) Though I don't calculate it here because it would take a lot longer to round up the data, a better measure might be start-to-end-of-season improvement in rank, beating expectations. This is unlikely for legacy teams with big media markets (think Notre Dame and Penn State) for cynical business reasons. Legacy teams tend to be consistently over-ranked in the preseason and under-perform during the season, ending up lower; for new hotshots in small markets it's the obvious (think Boise State or TCU.) This is the way the NCAA underhandedly seeds the bowls in order to maximize revenues. Since we're only dealing with one team this may not have any effect here, or rather, it only will to the extent that the rating powers-that-be are changing their opinion over time about how much they want PSU in a bowl, and/or the extent to which they're using this technique.


So what does this show? Paterno does have the highest win rate, but a lower % of winning seasons. That suggests that under Paterno, when Penn State was good, they were great, but when they sucked, they really sucked. (Specifically, they sucked in the 21st century, but more on this in a bit.) But the statistical fallacy is that there is more noise in Paterno's history because his tenure was so much longer than Franklin's so far. Franklin gets to more bowls (see footnote #1) but does worse in them.

Taking out the win streak because it's so heavily dependent on tenure, in these categories, Engle wins for % of bowl games he won, Paterno wins on win % and % of seasons ending up in the AP rankings, and Franklin wins on % of winning seasons, % of bowl seasons, and final AP when ranked. That is to say, Paterno was in the ranked teams list a little more often than Franklin at the end of the seasons, but ranked lower.

What does it look like when we compare the first four seasons of all three coaches - that is, when Engle and Paterno were in Franklin's position near the start of their careers, how did they look?

	Engle-4	Paterno-4	Franklin
Win %	62.2	81.4	67.9
% Winning Seasons	75	75	100
Longest win streak	4	3	4
% bowl seasons	0	75.0	100
% bowl wins	N/A	62.5	50
% AP ranked seasons	0	75.0	50.0
final AP, when ranked	N/A	4.7	7.5

Paterno got off to a strong start, again with high win percentage - that doesn't go away. Franklin spreads the wins out more and is more consistent season to season. It's worth noting that Paterno wasn't taking over a still-shocked program that had trouble recruiting.


What about the 2000's?

Paterno had his first losing season in 1988 after a 21-year streak of winning seasons. After that, others followed: 2000, 2001, 2003, 2004. You can see the trend over time here. (Note, his first non-winning season was a tie, not a losing season, and was also his very first as the head coach in 1966.) It may be worth pointing out that when the slide started in around 1998, Paterno was already 71.



It might seem a little mean to pile on a coach after he's gone, when there was no shortage of people in the aughts saying that Joe should retire (and it looks like they were right, for more reasons than they knew.) But Penn State continued its rabid fanbase, and does so even now after the scandal. (Here's the reason why people stick with unpopular or losing teams.)

Future possible project: analyze rankings movements during Paterno's career based on margins, and if there is some estimate of how many points off the margin you lose by putting in (second string, third string, etc.), and you correlate end-of-season rankings with revenues, you can actually calculate how much money you cost a university by refusing to run up the score.

Geographical NFL Traitors: Where People Are Loyal to a Team Other Than the Closest One

The map on top is "closest counties to the franchise location" (which shows what people's loyalty "should" be) and is from user @kodali_siva on Twitter, the past few days. The map on the bottom is actual primary loyalty by county from The Atlantic in 2014 (the year makes a difference because teams have moved since then.) Of course we want to know where the untrustable people are, i.e., the ones who don't swear fealty to the proper teams, so we can avoid those areas. More seriously, the reason this is interesting is that part of fandom is cultural afiliation - even though you're physically closer to City A, you're across the state line; or you're in a cultural region that's more like City B. It's even been argued that sports loyalties reveal underlying cultural divides going back to colonial times, i.e. the Keith line in New Jersey between Philly and New York teams (and culture).

What follows is a delightful romp through the quirks and personality disorders that make each and every pocket of our country so special. Join me wontcha?



So where, exactly, are the disloyal people, unworthy of the name comrade?

First, the West Coast is goofy because of the way that the map has to divide territory between the Raiders and Niners, being in the same metro area as they are. Also, legalized cannabis. Besides, the Raiders are constantly threatening to move to Vegas or anywhere besides Oakland, so who cares anyway. Still, the Niners manage to invade what should be Seahawks territory. If it's any comfort, southern Oregon is mostly inhabited by sasquatch anyway, though I'm a bit concerned that they've evolved enough to respond to NFL marketing surveys.

Then there's Nevada. That a state full of snakes, brothels and gamblers is disloyal should come as no surprise, but somehow its perfidy still manages to shock. Some of those northwestern Nevada types follow the Niners, but then there's the Broncos and - the Dallas Cowboys? Yes, as we'll see there are islands of Cowboy deviancy throughout the western US, the biggest of which is in Nevada (by proximity, the rest of the state should almost all be LA Rams territory.)

While we're noticing this singular most foul corruption of the loyalty map, the Cowboys also dominate Oklahoma (which should be partly KC Chiefs and a litte Broncos), Arkansas (should be about even between Cowboys, Chiefs, Tennessee and Saints) and the rest of Texas that Houston should rightly claim, like the Gulf Coast. My bet is that Oklahoma and Arkansas identify more with Texas than the Midwest or New Orleans respectively, and that people in more rural Texas outside of Houston are culturally anti-Houston, which somehow makes them pro-Dallas. As noted before, these malodorous islands of Dallas fans can be found throughout the country, much to the chagrin of decent Americans. I can't explain why this might be or how these misshapen cretins became "America's team." As it were, the Notre Dame of pro football, and yes of course that's an insult because what else could it be.

The Chargers are consistent between geography and proximity - down there in one corner of the country, they can have their little Orange County and San Diego, where they are fondly remembered from before their pointless move. Good for them!

Utahans give away some rightful Broncos territory to the Cardinals...but New Mexicans give away Broncos AND Cardinals territory to, who else, the Cowboys. This is what saddened me most about this post because I used to really like New Mexico.

The Vikings-Broncos border has some give and take that comes out about even but, here the state border effect comes into play, and there are plenty of people in western Wisconsin who SHOULD, by proximity, be Vikings fans. For the Green Bay fans, I want to be very clear about this (read slow so you can understand): a lot of Green Bay fans should actually be Vikings fans, and it's only because of your flawed moral character that you're not. I also don't get the pockets of Nebraskans who like Green Bay, other than, like Packers fans, the people of northeast Nebraska are physically very unattractive. Also, "Oh but we're a co-op everyone owns part of the team blah blah blah" to which the strongest counterargument is: your face.

In the South, fandom for the Titans, Panthers and Falcons basically follows state lines (with some bizarre exceptions), which does NOT follow the closest-county rule at all. The Saints however go far beyond where they should be, eating into Atlanta's and especially Tennessee's territory. My bet is that there's a "Gulf State" cultural identity effect here. The lines between New England and the New York teams show a similar effect - it's not about proximity, it's about whether you choose to identify as a New Englander or with New York/New Jersey. And if you find yourself confronted with this choice, you should consider the words of Sartre, that the only serious philosophical question is suicide.

On to Pittsburgh. You will notice the bigger-than-expected island of yellow on the actual loyalty map as well as a few counties scattered throughout South Carolina. This is a combination of identifying as Pennsylvanian (or post-coal-industrial Appalachia for the West Virginians) and the desire to AVOID identifying with Philly, similar to but stronger than the effect I argued for in Texas with Houston. (I am qualified to comment on this as I am a bit of an authority on Pennsylvania "culture".) After the Eagles Superbowl win from the 2017-18 season I bet that line will be pushed farther west. The South Carolina Steelers counties are probably all retirees, as an absolute flood of Pennsylvanians sick of snow has moved to cheaper SC instead of FL in recent years, raising the average IQ of both areas (ZING!)

I don't know why Dolphin fans extend all the way to northern Florida, or why no one seems to want anything to do with Jacksonville. I considered whether gators keep eating everyone, but a) that's just wishful thinking and b) doesn't explain why Miamians wouldn't be similarly torn to shreds in the jaws of these handsome reptiles, proving themselves in the process to be man's other best friend.

And for a final proof that the world is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we CAN imagine, witness that the Cleveland Browns actually have more fan territory than they should, relative to geography. To resolve this seeming paradox I can offer no better explanation than the understandable self-loathing of Ohioans.

A final serious note: if I failed to insult your team, state, cultural region or religion in this post, rest assured it's because you're too insignificant to bother with.

When I have more time, i.e. civilization has collapsed, I'm the last man on Earth, and I have accumulated enough canned food that I don't have to forage, I'm going to look at county-level per capita income, as well as "territorial encroachment" and its effect on team revenue and value.

Is There a Correlation Between NCAA Team Ranking and NFL Players Produced?

Some college teams disproportionately produce NFL players. It's not quite a Pareto distribution, but it's getting there: of about 3300 2016 starters listed by the NFL, they came from 355 college teams - and 20% of the teams produced 65% of the players.

You would expect that the better-performing teams would produce more players, but is this the case? And if there is a relationship, do some college teams produce even more NFL players than you would expect, given their average end-of-season rankings? (And vice versa.)

Methodology: source comes from sportingcharts.com and Coaches Poll end of season ranking. NFL Players Association says the average NFL career is about 3.5 years, so for the 2016 season, most of the players would likely be those who were seniors in 2012-2015. Therefore the "ranking" here is the averaged end-of-season ranking for those years. The perennial problem of these analyses is how to count unranked years and most other analyses assign "26" for ranking when the team is unranked, which is what I do here.


Yes, there's a trend, and it's as you'd expect. For every one-step improvement in the average ranking over that four year period, you send on average 1.7 more players to the NFL. You can see that there are outliers:

Michigan, Oregon, and Navy under-produce NFL players, relative to their rankings.

Florida, Florida State, LSU and and Georgia over-produce players, given their rankings.

So if you go to an SEC school, it doesn't even matter if you win!

To see if my methodology is sound, I should do multiple four-year sets of ranking averages (2011-2014, 2010-2013, etc.) compared to the 2015 NFL roster and 2014 roster respectively, etc. and then see if the fit is WORSE when mismatched (i.e., 2011-2014 should determine the 2015 roster better than 2014 and 2016) but I'm not getting paid for this am I.

I could speculate about the reasons for this - whether under-producing means good coaching (or bad), same for recruiting, or non-NFL (or non-football) careers pursued by athletes at the "under-producing" schools, etc. But the under- and over-production by conference is interesting in itself.

Why Do People Remain Loyal to a Losing Team?

Cross-posted to the Late Enlightenment and Cognition and Evolution.

tl;dr Sports fan behavior is explained by a combination of constant identity-forming team loyalty which is an end in itself, and status signaling by association which is modulated by team performance. These two factors differ between individuals and are associated with different cognitive styles, with constant loyalty more associated with moral foundations and intransitive preferences.

It's been observed that you can tell who a team's true fans are by noticing who remains loyal to the team even when that team is losing. I think this is meaningful, but it does beg the question: what are those fans getting out of it?[1] Of course any speculation about this must mention the very real example of the Cleveland Browns, who over the past 2 years have a 1-31 record, and this year after going 0-16 they were on the receiving end of a sarcastic "perfect season" parade.

Humans get utility from associating with others with high status. Much of the happiness that a sports fan gets from their emotional connection to their team derives from this, and many observations are consistent with what a status-by-association theory would predict: fans are happier when their teams win because they feel high status and can signal higher status, they engage in extreme dominance displays when their teams win important contests (i.e., people acting like idiots as they come out of a championship game if their team won, yelling, jumping on cars, setting off fireworks) but not if they didn't win, they attend games more when the team is winning and less when the team is losing, and they wear branded gear to identify themselves with the team and otherwise let others know of their association.[2]

But this theory falls short of explaining why, for example, there is any such thing as a team's consistent fanbase. By this model, everyone should just cheer for the best team, game by game (or even play by play!) It especially doesn't explain why the the Cleveland Browns have any fans left at all; supposedly they're a football team but I've seen a number of convincing arguments against that, for instance, every game of the 2017 season. During an 0-16 season you would expect that if fandom is about fully rational people maximizing utility by associating with high status teams, the fans would stop posting on forums, they would put their gear away and deny to others that they were fans, and the stadium would not just have lower attendance, it would be completely empty. Yet this is not what happened.

I think the answer here very likely has to do with the gap we see between two types of beliefs/behaviors that often produce apparent impasses in other domains of life, especially religion and politics, the intensity of which differs between individuals. This gap in rational and more instinctual behavior will seem very familiar to readers of books like Jonathan Haidt's Righteous Mind, or Simler and Hanson's Elephant in the Brain. Humans demonstrate some domains in their cognition which are inflexible and impervious to reason - to use Haidt's categories, harm, fairness, loyalty, authority, and purity. By "inflexible" I mean "not open to discussion, or conversion into money or other goods/services." For example, you likely do not believe that murdering children is morally acceptable. Are you interested in hearing arguments about why it might be morally acceptable? If you would never consider such a thing, and you're uncomfortable that I would even suggest it in a thought experiment, you're showing inflexibility in discussing it. Okay - would you kill an adult for $50,000? I see that also upset you, I'm sorry to have opened with such a low offer! $75,000 then? You're being inflexible (I hope!) in reacting by thinking "It's not about the number!" Okay, what's the conversion rate between adults and children? Forget murder, how about urinating on a picture of your family for money? etc., you get the point. "Inflexible" means it can't even be suggested as open for discussion, which includes not being allowed to convert between moral-foundation-violating acts and money, or between different types immoral acts. (A favorite of action movies or dramas to demonstrate the extreme evil of an antagonist is to have them force someone declare the relative value of immoral acts, e.g. Sophie's Choice.) To connect to the abstract - the philosophical term for having values that cannot be negotiated, and for which there is no relative value like this, is that they are intransitive.

I took you on this little tour of moral darkness to illustrate that morally normal humans do not adhere to consistent rationality, and the ones that actually do are psychopaths.[3] (You may be interested to know that Haidt found that when he surveyed the business students he was teaching, they scored low on every single moral dimension, taught as they are that everything is negotiable.) So what does all this have to do with the Cleveland Browns? Many of us have noticed that "hardcore" sports fans - the ones who stick around with long faces even when the Browns are losing, and falsify the first model above - tend to have certain personality and cultural characteristics that fit well with some of these inflexible moral foundations: they tend to be more religious, more nationalistic, more conservative and more valuing of loyalty and authority.[4] Sports fans rarely become hardcore about a team after entering adulthood, and very often there is a family lineage of fandom - and these are exactly the times and ways in which characteristics of core identity are formed. Also telling, while there were about 3,000 people who showed up for the Cleveland Browns parade, there were many fans who were quite angry about it - but online objections were mostly that it was "embarrassing". (No mention of the 0-16 record that inspired the parade.)

Before I put into words what might be motivating them and make predictions, here's a summary of the two kinds of of beliefs, producing two kinds of motivation. While these beliefs exist in everyone, there is going to be a distribution in the population, with one category of beliefs dominating the fandom-related cognition of some fans, and the other category dominating that of others.

HARDCORE FAN	CASUAL FAN
motivated by moral foundations	by utility calculations
end in themselves	deliberate, external goal-oriented
higher value on loyalty	lower value on loyalty
adopted in childhood, maybe from family	adopted voluntarily in adulthood
not negotiable	negotiable
central to identity	not central to identity
unwilling or unable to verbalize	position clearly verbalized
more often encountered in person	more often encountered online
sees casual fans as untrustworthy, sleazy	sees hardcore fans as stupid, gullible

Of course it's a spectrum, and every fan is somewhere on this spectrum, but many of us clearly lean toward one or the other end. (If you're reading this, you're more likely in the right column than the left.)

To summarize the hardcore fan: he is motivated by more basic, instinctual moral drives, especially loyalty. Being a good fan is an end in itself, and an offer to burn a team jersey, to cheer for the other team, etc. in exchange for money is likely to not only be immediately refused but to provoke active offense. These fans consider their fandom a crucial part of their identity, to the extent of including team-related themes in their weddings or mentioning it in obituaries ("he lives and dies by the Browns"; "a Browns fan to the core.") He can get uncomfortable when the business aspects of a professional sport are discussed and overshadow the games on the field. Asking him to explain his fandom will be met with puzzlement, anger, or a jumbled set of team cheers and slogans, in the same manner as a person asked to explain why they are patriotic or follow a certain religion - "If I have to explain it to you, you'll never understand." And finally, because tribal loyalty sentiments are more warning-barks or team cheers than any kind of actionable proposition, you're more likely to hear such sentiments when talking to him in person, where the nonverbal (affect-laden and irrational) part of communication dominates. He will be a fan for life. When the bandwagon people disappear during losing seasons the hardcore fan says "Good riddance, good-time Charlie."

To summarize the casual fan: he is motivated by utility calculations about external goals (this team might win this year so I'll cheer for them, maybe I can make friends this way, maybe I'll look successful if I follow a good team.) He doesn't see what's impressive about staying loyal to losers, and really doesn't understand why making fun of your team when they lose is shameful or embarrassing. He probably picked up his fandom after college, maybe when he moved to a new city. He probably don't care either way about the business dealings of the team. If someone offered him money to stay home from a game or burn team logos, he would seriously consider the offer. He doesn't introduce himself to strangers as a fan, and five years from now he might not be following the team, or might not be following the sport at all. He can give clear reasons why he started following the team, and you're more likely to hear from people like him online. He shakes his head at the hardcores who keep shelling out cash for losing teams' jerseys.

Both the hardcores and non-hardcores gain utility in proportion to the team's performance. A team's performance can be negative, causing you to lose utility by associating with them.[5] But there must be another source of utility for the hardcores, who somehow gain utility from the association no matter the team's performance - and that source of utility is a constant ability to demonstrate loyalty, period, to others as well as to themselves to reinforce their own identity. And this signal is most informative when your side is losing.[6] Speaking quantitatively, in the utility equation for this model, there are two terms, loyalty (a constant for everyone, hardcore or not), plus the product of team performance times associative utility. Associative utility is how much your utility changes per team winningness. Both loyalty and associative utility vary by individuals, and team performance of course is determined by the team. The equation looks like this:

Total utility = Loyalty-based utility + (Team performance * associative utility)

Team performance can be positive or negative. For the hardcores, loyalty is such a large term that it doesn't matter how negative team performance is, loyalty will alway be greater and the total utility will always be positive (this could be the definition of "hardcore", "rain or shine", etc.) Further toward the other end of the spectrum, the value of loyalty signaling decreases and the team performance makes more of a difference in whether people keep following the team. It's also worth pointing out that this explains people who don't care about sports at all, because they have zero loyalty and zero associative utility - that is, it doesn't matter how much the team wins, they still won't care.


PREDICTIONS

Many of these predictions seem trivial, but the point is to relate these predictions to specific components of the hardcore fan's motivation structure as noted in the table above, which would be more informative.

• While utility is hard to measure directly, there are good proxies for it, like revenues, attendance, or Nielsen ratings. Given that there will be a distribution of hardcore to non-hardcore fans, there will be a non-zero floor to revenues so even 0-16 teams don't go to zero, as we observed. If we graph all of the teams on performance vs utility proxy, I would expect a mostly linear-looking scatter plot with an increase in the slope at the good end, for those teams with some expectation of a national championship, and possibly a flattening at the bottom. This may depend more on expected utility (if fans are pleasantly surprised by a win vs. they expect their team always to win.) I plan to try to collect some kind of utility-proxy data and see if this is in fact the case.
• In general a sport will be more successful in inspiring loyalty, the more similar it is to tribal warfare (always a reliable revenue stream for every team); maybe this is why football has eclipsed baseball as the national pastime.
• The more hardcore, the more they will pay attention to the outside charity activities of their own team, and the more outraged they will be by disloyalty-demonstrating acts, e.g. kneeling during the national anthem. They will also be more interested in the moral failings of opposing teams, especially rivals.
• The more hardcore, the less they will be interested in statistics, especially of other teams, even ones their teams are playing in important games.
• The more hardcore, the greater the difference in their interest in a player when he is on their team, vs. after he is traded. That is, hardcores think each of their players is a great person on and off the field - when he plays for their team - and any suggestion that they'll stop caring about him the second he is traded is likely to be met with hostility, but in fact this is the behavior they demonstrate. (He will also be annoyed when asked why, or when Seinfeld is cited - "Essentially you're cheering for clothing.")
• The more hardcore, the more they will feel sad or angry after a loss, and the more likely they are to attend or watch the next game despite having been very sad or angry at the last game's outcome.
• The more hardcore, the less tolerant they will be of fans behaving negatively toward the team, even when the team loses (very concrete and contra expectations here: you might expect hardcore fans to support a parade showing anger against the people making their Browns lose, but it seems to be exactly the opposite. Parallels to gay marriage here too: how exactly does the 0-16 parade degrade your fandom, when you didn't attend?)
• The more hardcore, the more they will confuse the team with a government agency or public good (i.e., demanding that the city finance a new stadium.)[7] More recent teams with cities that have highly educated and/or mobile populations (i.e. the coastal Pacific) will therefore find that they can't get what they want from those cities, because the voters don't care (Seattle, San Francisco, San Diego) where other cities filled with less mobile, less educated people would crucify their mayor for allowing a team to leave on their watch.
• It's often been noted that the Midwest with its brutal early winters has far more rabid sports fans than the mild West Coast. One possibility is that the loyalty-demonstration value of attending every game is diminished when all of those games are 70 F and sunny, vs some of them being freezing cold. (Think of the people who still wait in line in the cold and dark on Black Friday morning to buy things for their families. They do know that Amazon exists. So what do you think they're really doing?) Of course there could be a climate-independent cultural difference between east and west coast, but the model's prediction would be that Miami has equally low loyalty.
• The more hardcore, the more they will be upset if a star player leaves for another franchise, or the whole team moves to another city, and they use words like "betrayal."[7]
• The more hardcore, the less tolerant they will be of long-term, off-field strategies, especially ones that alter play and result in on-field losses. (Both the 2008 Detroit Lions and 2017 Cleveland Browns had 4-0 preseasons, then went 0-16. Tanking (here and here) and/or salary cap manipulation? Difficult to explain as mere incompetence. And if it were confirmed that this is what is happening, the hardcore fans would be angry; casual fans might say "Huh, that's kind of clever, although it means you've been putting a bad product on the field." "My team is not a 'product'!" the hardcore fan says.)
• I'm not sure what to predict about the impact of hardcoreness on betting. The hardcores' loyalty may make them become overconfident in their team's performance. On the other hand, moral foundations-related beliefs are often kept carefully separate from anything affecting real-world decision-making. By that I mean: sacred beliefs are often more tribal chant than actionable proposition, and in general, people desperately avoid any bet that touches their moral foundations (next time someone makes a verifiable statement about religion or politics that you disagree with, offer to bet them, and see what happens. Typically they backtrack to a non-verifiable version of what they said, and/or get very offended that you would "cheapen" such an important matter by betting on it - which are all moves to avoid testing their belief.) Then again, the hardcore fans presumably know more about their team than most others, which means they should be more confident in their predictions, and be more willing to bet. Consequently they may be less willing to bet proportional to their claimed confidence, than would a casual fan with equal knowledge of the team would be. In my one test of this during March Madness, I found that self-identified fans did more accurately predict the outcome of a game involving their team than non-fans, but I collected no information on willingness to bet.

Footnotes

[1] This very article is diagnostic. By trying to dissect loyalty, instead of taking it as an obvious good and discussing it in the context of a specific team, I mark myself as someone with a small loyalty term in my equation - whereas people whose sports utility equation is dominated by loyalty would not understand, and/or be actively be offended by, a question like "What do you get out of being a fan of your team?"

[2] One might argue that a purely rational human being would ignore sports altogether - what do a bunch of guys chasing a ball on a field somewhere else in my city have anything to do with me, I've never even met them! - and I'm sympathetic to that argument.

[3] I hope no one read the paragraph about the price of murder and thought, "Hmmm...What is my price to kill someone?" In the case of exemplar psychopath Richard Kuklinski, he got positive utility from harming people so he kept doing it even after he ran out of work.

[4] When people do not have VNM-consistent rationality (that is, they have these inflexible, non-negotiable, non-fungible beliefs - i.e., intransitive preferences) - they can be turned into money pumps, by observant and unscrupulous characters who can carve their motivation structure at the joints, i.e. focusing on the the inconsistencies. While this has been reproduced now in artificial settings, not only salespeople but politicians have been doing it since the dawn of civilization. The NFL and in particular the Cleveland Browns are doing exactly this to the fans by exploiting the intransitive preference of loyalty, and I would be very surprised if their marketing does not already have a model of their fans and spending patterns similar to what I've described here. Another follow-up is to look for literature on whether psychopathy allows one to see these disconnects more easily, or (hopefully) the ability to see them and the willingness to act on them are unrelated and therefore form a mercifully narrower sliver on a Venn diagram of the population.

[5] There's probably a Markovian/hedonic treadmill effect here too, where the utility multiplier from a team's win is not constant but rather influenced by expectations based on the team's record. Next year if the Patriots go 9-3, fans leaving a game after a win won't be as happy as Browns fans if the Browns have the same record.

[6] Remember Karl Rove dragging out the 2012 election night broadcast and refusing to accept the outcome, seeming a little nuts? But simultaneously advertising to ten million Republicans watching that he never ever gives up. Say what you will about Karl Rove, but "bad strategic thinker" was not among the many epithets hurled at him.

[7] When the Baltimore Colts were about to move to Indianapolis in 1984, the city actually tried to pass an eminent domain act (!) to take over the team, but the Colts escaped with the team's property under cover of darkness the night before. Other teams like the Chargers have found a much more lukewarm reaction on threatening to leave, and found themselves without many fans.

[8] While I wrote this post I was wearing a Garfunkel and Oates sportsball T-shirt, so you can guess which end of the spectrum I'm near.

People Who Want New Stadiums Are Quite Often Worthless, Unpleasant, Stupid

Seattle told the Supersonics to get lost last decade, in a widely praised move against a pro team that thought they were entitled to tax money. (The same thing happened to the San Diego Chargers more recently.) When councilmembers dared vote against the entitled yahoos who wanted to build another stadium, the deviants came out of the woodwork. I think attorney Jason M. Feldman should be singled out as a great example of these sad bitter losers, who took the time to email the dissenting councilmembers and said this:

I can only hope that you each find ways to quickly and painfully end yourselves. Each of you should rot in hell for what you took from me yesterday...Please don't misunderstand me. I TRULY pray for nothing but horrible things for each of you moving forward. You have made this world a worse place by whoring yourselves out to the highest bidder. Please Please Please do the honorable thing and end yourselves. Each of you are disgraceful pieces of trash that deserve nothing but horrible outcomes.

Turns out that Feldman was suspended from his state bar after a client alleged he sexually assaulted her. That such a gentleman would comport himself in this manner is, I know, shocking! Kidding, he's an ass-face with poor impulse control and went out of his way to be a jerk so he should suffer.

Fortunately, voters across the country have figured out that stadiums are bad, bad UNDERperformers as investments, and/or as tools to bring outside tourist dollars into a city. That is to say, if there were a little league of investments, you'd have to have a heartbreaking talk with stadiums and their parents and say, "I'm sorry, but little Stadiums here just isn't cut out for this game, and not everyone gets a trophy."

Predicting Steelers Games

[Added at the end of the season: this ended up being very fun, but not an effective way to test whether sheer team loyalty and knowledge versus general unbiased football knowledge are better for predicting game outcomes. The reason it wasn't a good test of this was that early on, my mother realized that her approach of "I like the Steelers so I will always predict that they win" was in conflict with her moral value of "I don't like losing money to my son". She therefore started asking me to tell her what the official spread was, and more or less based her prediction on that (so much for information-free statements about team loyalty when you're pinned down by a measureable statement with an actual consequence! Not that surprising.) But, that's where I also learned I had a conflict; namely, my moral values of "I don't like losing money to my mother" and "Don't lie to your mother" were in conflict, which I promptly solved by always lying to her about the spread so that I could win. Once she realized her son was the kind of terrible person who would lie to his mother for money (clearly because of his bad upbringing) she started looking the spread up on her own (who knew, your mother will use the internet to avoid losing bets!) So after 4-5 games her bets were mostly informed by the Vegas spread just as mine were, not really reflecting the accuracy of loyalty vs expert estimates. But most importantly, I still came out 2 games ahead.]

(If you're a math-minded sports fan much of this may seem like a Neanderthal re-discovering fire - if so, please don't hesitate to comment and point me to resources or critique errors in my thinking.)

This isn't really a team sports blog but occasionally there's some fun with statistics - for example, showing how the BCS Bowl System seeds high-earning teams into its bowls through its bullsh*t preseason rankings, or seeing if there's bias in predicting March Madness games among fans vs. impartial predictors. Now I have a new and exciting project: betting with my mom on Pittsburgh Steelers games.

I don't know that much about football and I certainly don't have loyalty to any team, but I like the statistics of it. And I really like taking money and pride away from the wonderful woman who brought me into this world. But I also want to see how the spread we settle on for our bets, differs from the Vegas line, and whether it does so systematically. (The only way I can swindle her is if she doesn't have the same information I do, i.e. doesn't know the Vegas line. I got her a smartphone with my own money, and if she would use the damn thing she could look it up herself. So unless my take is more than the price of the smartphone I'm not a bad son.)

Statistically, the point spread is the handicap needed for a 50:50 outcome. I've always been interested in the effect of team loyalty on predictions - so in other words, does my mom's loyalty to the Steelers make her think they are more favored than they really are? And of course, in a zero sum game, you want the other person to be irrational in deciding where the 50:50 cut off is. So far, our spreads have been 1.3 points more in the Steelers' favor than Vegas, and I'm 2-1, and it's a dollar a game so she owes me 3.5 zloty. (I only accept Polish currency.)

What I'll be looking for as the season progresses:

• Do the Vegas spreads converge on actual scores as the season progresses, i.e. as there's more information available about the teams? So far this season, they've been way off. Taking the spread and betting on the underdogs, this week you'd have made good money.
• What is the relationship between Elo rating and spread? 538 says it's about one game point per 25 Elo points.
• Finally, what's closer to the actual score, the Vegas line or the K10 bet - in terms of both average difference, and standard deviation? Most importantly, how were the bet outcomes for each spread?

ADDENDUM

When I looked up the score for the game (why sit there and watch the game when you can just get the score at the end! Waste of time!) I ended up reading about this week's opponent, the Cleveland Browns. It's easy to develop a morbid fascination with bad, bad teams. The Browns are certainly that, and the franchise has been drowning in toilet water for a decade. Cleveland almost became a 0-16 team last year. I really can't say more about how bad the Browns are, and how much any affiliation with them will cause you to suffer (much like a sports fan's version of the puzzle box from Hellraiser) than this Deadspin article. But my favorite part of their last season is as follows. Trying to salvage some humor from the Browns' suckitude and passive-aggressively punish them, their fans had gone so far as to start raising money for an oh-and-16 parade. And guess what? After fourteen long, stupid, torturous games, on Christmas Eve 2016 the Browns narrowly defeated the San Diego Chargers. THAT is when they finally decided to get their act together, when it would ruin their fans' plans, and after it could not possibly matter anymore in terms of the playoffs, and (my favorite part) against a team that technically would no longer exist after the end of the season (the Chargers moved to LA after that season.) So not only was the win completely pointless, it robbed the fans of their one moment of levity. It was worse than worthless. I really like that.

Have We Reached Peak Bowl?

Cross-posted at the Late Enlightenment.


This figure is from an earlier post about the bowl system. The reason for the expansion of the bowl system is easy: more money, for the teams and cities. As long as the fans keep coming, what's not to like?

But there must be a saturation point for any market, and maybe we've hit it for the bowl system. After 39.8% attendance this year, San Diego's Pointsettia Bowl is being discontinued - after being underperformed only by one other bowl, the Quick Lane Bowl in Detroit at 29.4%.

Rose Bowl 2017

It was highest scoring game in the history of the Bowl (in fact, that was already true by the third quarter) as well as the coldest. In fact it felt and looked very much like a mid-to-late October day in Pennsylvania (plus a stiff North Pacific breeze), which I would've thought favored us more. Despite the heartbreaking last-5-seconds loss, it was a great season, an exciting game, and USC's fans are pretty solid as fans go - one held onto and returned a dropped wallet for someone in our group, and the between-fans conversations I heard in the food lines were always pretty civilized. Give me a Pac-12 fan over an SEC fan any day! Pre-game festivities shown below with the stadium in the background.






The Verdugo Hills (above, image credit summitpost) are right next to where we stayed in Burbank, and I've long wanted to get a run in along the spine of the ridge. I've been curious about this area ever since seeing them from across the way in Griffith Park (by the way, one of the most underrated urban parks in the country). They're just far enough from San Diego that when I lived down there they weren't worth driving to for their own sake, but I would always see them on the way to the Angeles NF and wonder. Once again, the schedule didn't allow and like Penn State's bowl win, it wasn't to be. (UPDATE: I did eventually get a run in there and they're pretty cool.)



Verdugo hills trail map, from the City of Glendale (legible version here). I was going to use hikespeak.com to plan my run.

As an aside, my late father was about the most insane Penn State football fan there was, and went to many bowl games - and every one he went to, Penn State lost. People used to jokingly tell him to stay away from the bowls, and when I worked out the odds I saw that he had a 1.3% chance of seeing only losses. So I went to the Rose Bowl, my first as an adult, partly to see if this phenomenon is genetic. It appears to be!



Above: DNA, along with equations and people seriously comparing things on a clipboard, have confirmed that the Penn State Bowl Game curse that runs in the K10 family is in fact genetic.

Olympic Stadiums are Bad Investments Too

In a Bloomberg piece Megan McArdle asks why Olympics-hosting countries are building new ruins (nice). Think she's kidding? Here's a stadium built just 12 years ago for the Athens Olympics.



Above is from Getty Images; actually from 2 years ago, so this was after only a decade. Looks like it's been a real boon to the people of Athens! McArdle goes on to detail the very bad, no good risk:benefit of hosting the Olympics. Actually it's inaccurate to call it a "risk" because we know what's going to happen. There will be massive cost overruns for facilities used once, and no tourism benefit: "According to The Economist, 'Beijing and London both attracted fewer visitors during their summer Olympics in 2008 and 2012 respectively than they had in the same period a year earlier.'"

Why is this a problem? Well duh, because those massive costs are paid by the taxpayer, and end up as public debt around their necks, with no economics benefit (except maybe to the contractors who build the stadiums on the public dime). Does this sound familiar? It should. There have been many studies of professional sports stadiums in the U.S. and how they have little to no benefit for the local economy. The San Diego Chargers have been talking out of both sides of their mouths about this for a while, trying to get taxpayers to pay contractors and team owners: "It will benefit the city economically! Wait, people have now seen the evidence that it won't? Well then you OWE it to the Chargers because of their winning tradition, be a first class city, blah blah blah!"

People do get wise to this nonsense. In Seattle people organized to stop the Supersonics from fleecing them, the Brewers left their stadium in Chandler, AZ (much to the benefit of Chandler's economy!) and in Oslo they just got disgusted with the ridiculous demands of the Olympic Committee for their 2020 bid, and told them to [redacted] themselves. Among the Committee's demands: "A meeting and cocktail party with Norway’s king before and after the opening ceremony, with the royal family or Norwegian Olympic committee paying for the party." Added sports reporter Anders Christiansen: "'People are skeptical about sport politicians driving around in limousines. That’s not very Norwegian.'" Not very rational, period! "Soon after the list was published, the Norwegian government announced that it was withdrawing its bid."

The Chargers Stadium: Suddenly They Want to Talk About Intangibles

Below: as Chargers fans explain, even if a stadium isn't actually a good investment, there are much more important things on the line here - like the winning history and most of all pride of this successful organization which we just can't afford to lose.


from network54.com
The Chargers want a new stadium in San Diego. The Chargers have traditionally argued that asking for taxpayer money is justified, because stadiums are a good investment. Actually, "argued" is a strong term; more like, they've repeatedly said it quickly, out of the side of their mouth in a press conference with no follow up questions.

Unfortunately for the Chargers and the NFL more generally, this discussion has generated open debate, and the facts that keep surfacing are consistently clear: stadiums are bad, bad underperformers as investments, and/or as tools to bring outside tourist dollars into a city. That is to say, if there were a little league of investments, you'd have to have a heartbreaking talk with stadiums and their parents and say, "I'm sorry, but little Stadiums here just isn't cut out for this game, and not everyone gets a trophy." From an article at the St. Louis Federal Reserve website:

Very little evidence exists to suggest that sporting events are better at attracting tourism dollars to a city than other activities. More often than not, tourists who attend a baseball or hockey game, for example, are in town on business or are visiting family and would have spent the money on another activity if the sports outlet were not available.5

Economists Roger Noll and Andrew Zimbalist have examined the issue in depth and argued that, as a general rule, sports facilities attract neither tourists nor new industry. A good example, once again, is Oriole Park at Camden Yards. This ballpark is probably the most successful at attracting outsiders since it is only 40 miles from the nation's capital, where there is no major league baseball team. About a third of the crowd at every game comes from outside the Baltimore area. Noll and Zimbalist point out that, "Even so, the net gain to Baltimore's economy in terms of new jobs and incremental tax revenues is only about $3 million a year—not much of a return on a $200 million investment."

(To stress the point - BALTIMORE IS THE BEST CASE SCENARIO FOR A STADIUM! 3 million a year for 200 million? What is this, socialism?)

So what does this mean? It means if you still want a new stadium you have to abandon the old approach. The pro-Chargers commenters on articles like this excellent one in the Union-Tribune are suspiciously astroturfy. Suddenly, it's all about "History! Culture! If you disagree you're not a real San Diegan!" That's typically the turn a discussion takes when all the facts are against you. (And if you seriously want to take that angle - San Diego is a city for winners. WINNERS. By that I mean, NOT the Chargers. You don't fit here guys!)

The thing to remember is that governments know that there are people who, let's be blunt, will bend over and do whatever they had to in order to keep their heroes from leaving the city or they'll cry their little eyes out, and these people would oblige the rest of us to do the same. And these people show up at election time, as the mayor of Seattle once found out when the Supersonics left. Let's not let this happen again. If you oppose government subsidies for the Chargers, then at election-time, reward the politicians who represented your views. Otherwise, why do you expect them to listen to you?

More reading if you need more data:


The consensus among economists is to oppose sports subsidies

The history of taxpayer funding of sports stadiums

The City That Said No to Baseball

Sports teams often threaten to leave the cities where they play, if they don't get nice new stadiums paid for by taxpayers. (Imagine if, say, Wal-Mart tried that for one of its stores.) The funny thing is, sports franchises don't like to directly answer "Would this be a sensible investment for the city?" If the answer is yes, there's a case to be made. If the answer is no, then you would expect the teams don't want this talked about out in the open, and then they rely on sports tribalism and mostly indirectly threaten the local mayors. That is, many voters are economically irrational and care about their team even if it's costing them money, and will vote out the mayor if he lets the team leave on his watch. This has already happened at least once. And (surprise!) the answer is a clear no, where new stadiums are concerned - they don't bring growth to the area around the stadium, or money into the region. (That's a Stanford study at that link. What, you don't believe Stanford, the engine of Silicon Valley? What are you, some kind of a communist?)

But other cities have told teams to get lost, and done just fine afterward. Here's another such story in Phoenix. And while we're at it, ask yourself: has San Francisco been hurt economically after telling the 49ers not to let the door hit them in the ass on the way down to Santa Clara?

World Series Ratings NOT More Sensitive to Geography Than Superbowl

This is cross-posted to my economics blog The Late Enlightenment. Next up: how much does winning actually correlate with the franchise making money?

It's been said that it's a television ratings disaster when the World Series comes down to two teams that are from smaller markets, and/or closer together. That is, the thinking goes that if St. Louis plays Kansas City, it's a Midwest series and people outside MO and KS don't care, and consequently a ratings disaster. Yet somehow this same concern isn't expressed for the Superbowl, which always seems curious.

I'd never seen actual data on this. So, I got data for all Superbowls through 2013, and all World Series from the same period (starting in 1968).

The inputs I looked at (i.e. things that could influence viewership) were as follows: 1) total combined home market size of each team in the championship (i.e. greater metro area)[a][b], 2) driving distance between the two teams, and 3) time zone distance between the two teams. The logic for using home market size is obvious. The idea behind using distance is that the farther apart the two teams, the greater ratings might be because the broader the appeal of the game (i.e. maybe people in L.A. don't care about Seattle, but if Seattle is playing some East Coast team, well that's different, and ratings would be better; vs. if the championship were between San Diego and Los Angeles, maybe people in the Northeast wouldn't care, and ratings would be worse.) I also looked at time zone distance for this same reason.

My outputs were: 1) absolute viewership, and 2) viewership as a percentaqge of national population. Because the average audience can change over time, I also tried looking at each year in comparison to the 11-year moving average that bracketed the year (average calculated from 5 preceding and 5 succeeding years). I then looked at scatter plots of the data.

The answer is that there is no relationship. That is, the television ratings of both the World Series and the NFL are NOT influenced by home market size or distance of the competing markets from each other. So if the A's and the Giants play each other, fine! (Not counting any earthquakes that might be induced thereby.) So it turns out that demography is NOT destiny, at least not in football and baseball ratings. The highest R^2 for a linear trend anywhere in these comparisons was a worthless 0.08; there's no point in showing you some uninformative crappy scatterplots.

Just for grins I also looked at ratings against the Excitement Index calculated for the playoffs since 2001 (were the games snoozefests or edge-of-your-seat games); if there were exciting playoffs, there might be better ratings. Again, no relationship.

It's clear from the graphs below (total viewership over time, then % of US population viewing over time) that even if baseball isn't more sensitive to geography, it has other issues.


[a]In cities which have two teams I ran two versions, one which assumed that everyone in the home market would follow their home team when it's in the championship, and another that assumed only half the sports population would support each team.
[b]It's clear that there are some strange geographic distributions of fans around the country, but for simplicity's sake I just used metro area population to get a number for home market.

Expected Utility, Expected Points

Cross-posted to Cognition and Evolution MDK10 Outside.

New analysis of football stats at advancednflstats.com, from an expected utility standpoint, rather than just "yards gained". One yard from the 50 to the 49 yard line is not the same as one yard from 1 to the end zone. The article points out that even points expected is limited and must be considered when time is not a factor, since a team up by a single point will sacrifice the opportunity for more points just to run time off the clock, and avoid the small chance of turnovers. Of course the departures from rational optimization are the most interesting, but they don't get into that (yet). A lot of those apparent deviations from rationality may in fact be maximizing something besides win-loss records. Professional football is a commercial endeavor and isn't played in a vacuum, and contra Lombardi, winning isn't the only thing. Profit is.

Below: from the linked post. Note the (unsurprisingly) slightly sigmoidal (importantly: non-linear) shape of the curve, which is why expected points is not the same as yards gained.

Geographic Analysis of Superbowl Winners: No Temperature, Distance or Time Zone Effects

In sports, even in championship games that are supposedly on neutral ground, some teams are thought to have home advantage if they play in or near their home state, for whatever reason; cultural similarity, less wear and tear from traveling, etc.. Do we see this in Superbowls?[1] (I didn't find any effects here so you can scroll up for a little more interesting one on ratings if you want.)

Not really. The winners, on average, have actually had to go a little farther from home than the losers (winners are on average 1487 miles from home, losers 1409, using Google maps driving distance to approximate.) And the home-state advantage, so far as it's happened - only four times so far, all with California teams playing in Cali - is a wash (2 wins, 2 losses). I also checked to see if the curve is U shaped, inverted or otherwise. For instance, if it's inverted U, maybe it's rough to take a 400 mile bus ride since further than that, you fly, and a full transcontinental flight is dehydrating and stiffening. But no dice. (If I cared, I would look at overall NFL records, not just the Superbowl, unless we're assuming the Superbowl is different.)


Above: distribution of Superbowl Games I through XLVII



Above: Superbowl wins and losses (#wins and losses proportional to radius of circle)

Seeing the maps above, you can tell that Superbowls and Superbowl teams are not distributed randomly. There's an obvious bias to the Northeast, as would be expected based on population density (and bigger markets). These maps show wins by CITY, not franchise (unless the franchises have remained stable and separate - so Jets and Giants are separate, but L.A. Raiders and Rams are not). But all things being equal, this should come out in the wash anyway.

So what about time zone changes? There's a known effect in sports called circadian advantage; it's assumed in medicine that we can adjust our circadian rates up or down 5%, so that we can adjust to one hour of time difference for each day. In fact in a peer-reviewed 1997 paper on Monday night football game advantage in the NFL, it was shown that West Coast teams do significantly better over East Coast teams than Vegas odds predict. (Note this is for night games, as would be expected.) It turns out that there is a slight but not significant difference overall: counting the Eastern time zone as 1, Central as 2, Mountain as 3 and Pacific as 4, Superbowl winners are from a little bit further east, with an average time zone of 1.8 vs the losers' average time zone of 1.9. There was no association between score margin and time zone either. I also checked to see whether there was any advantage to being closer to the time zone of the Superbowl location, or being from an earlier or later time zone, but there was not (the distribution was just about exactly coin-toss random).

While we're worrying about environmental factors, we might as well look at temperature - the home field's December average temperature, against the temperature on the field at the Superbowl. There is no clear curve for any relationship I checked (team's home December average temperature vs points scored, or difference from Superbowl city average temperature vs points scored.) There is a slight difference in terms of average "distance" (could be warmer or colder) between a team's home city, and the Superbowl city: winning teams are 20.9 degrees Fahrenheit off from the Superbowl temperature, and losers are 23.4 degrees off. In non-absolute value terms, the winners are on average 19.2 degrees colder at home vs the Superbowl, and the losers are 21.2 degrees colder at home.

What does this tell you about the Seahawks-Broncos matchup? Nothing! Who cares!

Footnotes
[1] Yeah, I said Superbowl. Not "big game". S-U-P-E-R-B-O-W-L, as in NFL. Listening to commercials you'd think saying Superbowl summons He Who Cannot Be Named or something.

[2] Smith RS, Guilleminault C, Efron B. Circadian rhythms and enhanced athletic performance in the National Football League. Sleep. 1997 May;20(5):362-5.

Documentary: The NFL's Concussion Crisis

Downtown San Diego Planning Survey - More Stadiums?

That would be a big "no", because we I don't think anyone wants our traffic more screwed up than it already is and parking downtown to be even worse - not to mention those new stadiums helping themslves to our tax dollars. The survey is here.

Why Doesn't the PAC-12 Want *Openly* For Profit Colleges in the League? Duh

Article from Sports Illustrated here. It's very strange that colleges are whining that Grand Canyon U. is doing this to make money. I guess all the Pac-12 schools have a loss every year from their football programs? No, they don't; they're massive money machines: and this is why in the large majority of U.S. states, the highest paid state employee is the football coach.

What's really going on here is a) ASU doesn't want to divide the college sports market in Phoenix, but they can't say that out loud; and b) the schools know that they're all running a business with the brand names of universities, and profiting from people's rabid allegiance from something they think of in tribal-colors terms rather than business terms. As soon as there's a for-profit school doing exactly the same thing, fans can't help but wonder if their own school isn't, as Steve Hsu perfectly described, "a tax-exempt sports-entertainment complex that is, for strange historical reasons, hosted by the higher education system". The article notes:

While it's true that non-profit universities reinvest their revenues from the major sports, they also rely heavily on outsiders' donations. Is it inherently more noble for Oregon to accept $68 million from mega-booster Phil Knight to build a new "Darth Vaderish Death Star" football complex than it is for Grand Canyon to spend its stockholder-generated capital on a "$300 million investment in state-of-the-art classrooms, laboratories, dormitories and athletic facilities?"

What I really want to see is Stanford twisting and turning to make an argument as to why a private school shouldn't be in the PAC-12. "But they're for-profit! They're for-profit!" Again, I don't think Stanford (or the rest) lose money on their sports programs. This is kind of like when one casino doesn't want another one starting down the road to compete with them, but they can't just come out and say that, so they somehow end up saying "2 casinos in this county would lead to immorality. But just one (us), that's okay." The talking-out-of-both-sides-of-their-mouth that goes on when people are defending their money, but can't be seen as defending money, is beyond hilarious and indeed, maybe into Orwellian territory!

And it bears repeating, big football schools are not notorious for being the most academically rigorous, although for what it's worth, there's no relationship in either direction between a school's football status and their academics (I ran the numbers myself). And lest you doubt that college football is, in fact, big business, then how about this piece showing that the many frustrating mysteries of the college football ranking system are all explained by one thing.

"a tax-exempt sports-entertainment complex that is, for strange historical reasons, hosted by the higher education system"

Perfect description by Steve Hsu. You may have previously seen the map he's talking about in another context (it's been making the rounds), but this is as good a way to put this bizarreness as any I've seen.