(07-29-2017 07:15 PM)Captain Bearcat Wrote:  

(07-29-2017 01:32 PM)Love and Honor Wrote:  There are two ways I look at a team's market: base and incremental support. Base is the number of fans you'd have if the team turned into cellar dwellers, had no star players or coaches, removed promotional and marketing activity, etc. and were basically left with die-hards, parents, the band, and people who show up just to get drunk. Incremental is what happens when you win and do all those things, draw abnormally good home opponents (e.g. P5 teams for the G5), get alumni and students who don't like sports a ton to show up because it's 'the event' to go to, and so on. Yet incremental isn't equal across schools due to size, history, and competition, someone like Rice couldn't fill their stadium even if they won ten games a year for example.

Usually when people say a team has a good market they're saying their base is high and they're taking advantage of their incremental potential. It's interesting since most schools that struggle with support had a 'golden age' at some point where they took advantage of both to some extent by winning a bunch and it resulted in a bit of a local following for a while. Take Miami, we averaged over 25K butts in the seats in 2003 and were 'the team' of the Miami Valley (far north Cincy suburbs through Dayton) outside of OSU's general pull of course. Fast forward over a decade later and we're basically at our base with only devoted alumni and Oxford townies showing up, though it looks like that's turning around.

This makes sense. I think "market size" is a proxy for the team's ceiling. In other words, how big can the bandwagon get?

If Rutgers and West Virginia both go 7-5, West Virginia will sell more bowl tickets and bring more TV viewers. That's the base.

But if Rutgers and West Virginia both go 12-0, Rutgers will sell more bowl tickets and bring more TV viewers. That's the bandwagoners. Rutgers has more potential for bandwagon fans due to their bigger market.

My knee-jerk reaction was "wait a minute, no ...", then I thought about it and it changed to "in this case, he could be right, good point".

But then I thought about a blue blood like Alabama. Rutgers is in a bigger market than Alabama, but no way on earth will a 12-0 Rutgers ever bring more fans, or draw more TV viewers, than a 12-0 Alabama.

That tells us that the sheer population of the city a school is in doesn't define their ceiling. Alabama has over the years established itself as a brand name that draws attention nationally, it transcends the limits of the population of Tuscaloosa, or even of the state of Alabama.

So while I think you are partially correct, there's also more at work here.