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Stupid, Insane, and Southern

“There’s this idea, primarily coming from alumni and boosters, that you can put enough money into a team and turn it into a powerhouse success story,” Andrew Zimbalist, a professor of economics at Smith College, said. “But that becomes more and more unrealistic with each passing year. It’s a fool’s errand, but people are crazy about football, so they keep trying.”

The trend, Zimbalist said, is predominantly located in the southern United States, where the “culture is very football dominant.”

… In its first season as an FBS team, Georgia State won zero games. The following year, it won one. Last season, the team won six of its 13 games… [A]verage attendance plummeted from the previous season’s 15,000 to 10,000.

… “I think we’re right where we should be from a competitive standpoint,” [said Georgia State’s AD].

… “It’s almost impossible to make this leap [to big-time football],” Zimbalist said. “It’s not rational to think otherwise. But if rationality was all that was at play here, this would have stopped a long time ago.”

… “[In the South, there’s the feeling that] if you don’t have a football team, then you’re somehow not a real campus, [said Mark Nagel, a sports management professor at the University of South Carolina,] and you are not on par with other schools. That emotion takes control.”

Margaret Soltan, July 18, 2016 7:29AM
Posted in: sport

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3 Responses to “Stupid, Insane, and Southern”

  1. dmf Says:
    July 18th, 2016 at 11:17AM

    if only it was just a southern madness of crowds, the nation-wide race to division 1 sports is everywhere even my old undergrad school has caught the fever, wtf does this “Go Seawolves! As a Division I school, Stony Brook has won 49 conference championships, received 28 national postseason bids, had three teams (2010 Men’s Lacrosse, 2010 Women’s Cross Country and 2012 Baseball) finish in the top 10 in the nation, and had one individual win a national championship in track & field” have to do with the state’s science center?

    http://www.stonybrook.edu/undergraduate-admissions/campus-life/

  2. JND Says:
    July 18th, 2016 at 3:33PM

    Will it help our cause here if Texas claims to be Western rather than Southern?

    Nah.

  3. Margaret Soltan Says:
    July 18th, 2016 at 4:24PM

    JND: LOL. Nice try…

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