With so many sports and so many different teams on television, it is important for broadcasters to know which sports and which teams draw the largest TV audiences. Statistics professor Dr. Scott Grimshaw and graduate student Paul Sabin sought to discover which teams people are drawn to watch.
In 2012, Grimshaw and Sabin tracked the viewing of college basketball teams NCAA Tournament. “We were surprised to find that the big-name teams don’t really have fans everywhere,” Grimshaw said. “College basketball is really a local sport.”
On average, most viewers are more drawn to “Cinderella teams”—the small, unknown teams that rise to the spotlight as they defeat all odds and win game after game—just as much as to the big-named teams. Grimshaw suspects this is because Cinderella teams make the most intriguing stories.
“The reason we watch sports is the same reason we watch other entertainment,” Grimshaw said. “We love a good story. We want drama. One source of drama in sports is the competition between two excellent teams with a championship at stake. Cinderella teams are another story people are drawn to watch.” Although a game between two well-known teams (such as last year’s championship between Duke and Wisconsin) draws a large audience, Cinderella teams are an equivalent or possibly better draw. “We like our favorite team,” Grimshaw said.
“We also can jump on the bandwagon of an unlikely team succeeding against the highest competition.” Grimshaw explained that this data is good for broadcasters because they will still get viewers even if an unknown team is playing. “It’s also okay in a tournament to invite somebody who isn’t a big-named team and just give them a chance,” Grimshaw said. “If they can win five consecutive games, people will watch that.”
Sabin and Grimshaw were able to collect this data using Nielsen ratings data—data that tracks how many people watch every television show. After Sabin organized the data, Grimshaw and Sabin fit a model and wrote a paper together.
Grimshaw has been at BYU for 21 years after working at the University of Maryland. Sabin was part of the BYU five-year integrated program and started this research as an undergraduate. He is currently obtaining his doctorate from Virginia Tech.