This week two excellent minds in sports brought up two interesting psychological aspects about the nature of professional football in our culture. In case you missed it, I'll recap.
Something to Talk About
Dave Berri was recently on Utah Now to discuss the business of college football with Doug Fabrizio. (An excellent listen. Dave is on about thirty-nine minutes in if you just want to hear his part). At this point, it's fair to call Dave a leading expert on the subject of college athletics. His knowledge on the history and economics of NCAA football certainly doesn't disappoint. Dave had a hypothesis that I liked. Part of the reason college football likely became such a big part of the college infrastructure is that people like talking about football!
Dave noted that in the early 1900s the popularity of college sports took off. Indeed, Princeton was able to build a stadium that could house forty thousand people! And this was constructed in 1914! It's a well known "joke" that a significant part of a college president's job is getting the alumni a winning football squad. Why though? Dave notes that the act of running a college and even some of the other aspects like publishing papers are boring to most people. So what do most people want to talk about with the president? The football team! The specific note Dave makes is that an alumni won't say "I hear you got a new economist that's going to publish a paper!", rather, they'll say "I hear you got a new running back, and we might beat CU this year!" And this has been going on for years. If all anyone talks to the boss about is football, is it possible that football gains more and more importance in the company?
In front of the Camera
On the recent Boxscore Geeks podcast, Brian had a fun hypothesis on why fans get angry at "greedy football players", and not "greedy owners." Brian's simple question: "Does it have anything to do with there always being a camera on the players?" And after thinking about this, the simple answer is "Yes!" It's worth noting that every major contract signing in the NFL gets big coverage by places like ESPN. In big football states like Texas, it's big news to find out where players are going to college.
Another aspect Dave talked about was the absurdity of the student-athlete. However, it's hard to get people to have sympathy for football players. A large part of this has to be a sampling error. Fans regularly see images of successful football players. They don't see the thousands that wash out. It's the exact trick the lottery uses. We can picture someone winning the lottery, but since we seldom see the losers, it's harder to get a genuine feel for just how rare success is.
Football, gasoline, and milk
Both Brian and Dave hit on a fundamental issue we have as humans. We are not great at doing "in our head statistics." When lots of people talk to us about football, we don't do the cost-benefit analysis to see how important it is. Instead, we say, "lots of people keep bringing this up! It must be very important!" When we see news about a player making $100 million dollars, we don't say "Hmmm, how many players tried to do that, maybe it's rare.", instead we say, "Wow, football players make a lot." In short, it's very easy to trick our brain by overloading it with news.
Dan Ariely had a perfect example on this a few years back. When gas prices were rising, it was incredibly common to hear people complain about it. In fact, when gas prices fall, lots of people talk about it too. Dan had a fun point, the price of milk, per gallon, had risen by a larger margin. It's rare to hear people complain about the "out of control" milk prices. And part of the reason is that when you buy milk you don't need to stand next to a large sign showing you how much milk costs for five-ten minutes. Every time you drink a sip of milk, you don't see a little counter go up. The way we fill our cars with gas, we get this information.
Of course, these aren't the only reasons football is such a huge part of the culture in the United States. But it is just worth noting that putting football next to academics for discussion topics is possibly part of why it caught hold in colleges. The new media cycle that shows every triumphant athlete at every level while ignoring the many failures skews how fans view the business. Hacking the human brain with how you give it information is nothing new. And both Dave and Brian picked up on a part of that this week. Hope you caught it!