Yesterday, I watched the North Carolina Tar Heels football team destroy the Rutgers Scarlet Knights 44-12. However, what struck me as most surprising is that by mid-way through the 3rd quarter a very large number of fans were starting to file out. Now it could be that many fans lived in the New York area (Bronx, Brooklyn, etc) and wanted to beat the traffic on a workday evening.
Just to give you a background, Rutgers was long considered to be among the worst teams in NCAA Division I football. Coach Greg Schiano did a remarkable job and turned around Rutgers into a team that went to 3 straight bowl games. On a side note, one of them was last year’s International Bowl; a game Accelteon played a role promoting. With this change in on-field performance, Rutgers saw an increase in media attention, fan following and a surge in attendance. (To read more about how on-field performance impacts the sports business download our report the CFL Gravity Index).
In our experience working with different sports leagues & teams and by looking at past research from other firms, there are numerous ways people segment fans. To simplify things, I’ll classify them as die-hard or casual. The die-hards, or the tribe, are the ones who saw this team through think and thin. The casuals are the ones that are more fickle and their participation in team activities wavers depending on the team’s performance.
However, doing some research after last night’s game, I believe there is yet another tribe at Rutgers. A tribe that is connected with Rutgers University, but would like to see nothing more than the Rutger’s football team fail. Or at least be mediocre.
Why?
To stop the $102M plan to expand Rutgers Stadium. Many students, professors and concerned stakeholders are against the plan to expand the stadium (which some called the House Ray Built, in reference to star runningback Ray Rice). The main reasons given are that it is a poor use of funds and it is against the wishes of students.
How big is this Tribe?
It is hard to say, but one Facebook group Stop the Stadium Expansion has 1,139 members as of the time of this post. Another blog calling itself the Friends of Rutgers Academics seems very happy with Rutger’s current on-field problems. On a blog entry following yesterday’s game, they quoted a post made on June 28thwith their season predictions:
We expect the Rutgers losses to start against Fresno State and we anticipate that every tough opponent will throttle Schiano’s Schoolboys. By season’s end we expect Rutgers Stadium to be as empty as a cemetery at midnight in a blizzard — and watch that diminished enthusiasm crush ticket sales for the 2009 campaign. New Jersey fans have no affection for losers and they will show it by not showing up.
Regardless, of its size, this tribe seems to be quite vocal in their opposition and quite content to see their own team fail. This is quite an interesting tribe dynamic between students who are fans of the Rutgers football team, and those students who are opposed to the stadium being expanded.
These issues are not limited to college sports only. There are cases where sports fans wish the team playing a different sport from the same city fail. An example of this are Toronto Argonaut fans in the mid-late 90s wanting the Blue Jays to do poorly so the Argos could get more media attention.
So not only do sports managers (Athletic Directors at major colleges and Presidents of pro teams) have to figure out how to keep their die-hards happy and how to get enough casual fans in, they now also have to worry about keeping the anti-tribe away.
