America’s Team Is Not in the Superbowl

February 3, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston
Cross-posted at Sociological Images

Six years ago, I blogged (here) that the Pittsburgh Steelers had become “America’s Team,” a title once claimed, perhaps legitimately, by the Dallas Cowboys. 

Now Ben Blatt at The Harvard College Sports Analysis Collective concludes that it’s still the Cowboys. (His post is here.)  

Still, based on their huge fan base and ability to remain the most popular team coast-to-coast, I think the Dallas Cowboys have earned the right to use the nickname  ‘America’s Team’.

To get data, Blatt posed as an advertiser and euchred Facebook into giving him some data from 155 million Facebook users, about half of the US population.  Blatt counted the “likes” for each NFL team.

 It’s Superbowls X, XIII, and XXX all over again – Steelers vs. Cowboys.  And the Cowboys have a slight edge.  But does that make them “America’s Team”? It should be easy to get more likes when you play to a metro area like Dallas that has twice as many people as Pittsburgh.  If the question is about “America’s Team,” we’re not interested in local support.  Just the opposite – we want to see how many fans a team has away from the home field. 

Blatt measures nationwide support by seeing which team gets the most likes in each Congressional district.  Unsurprisingly, each local team dominates its area.

The Cowboys are number one in the hearts of a wider area.  In Arkansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, New Mexico, Idaho, and Utah they crush the non-existent competition.  Curiously, Blatt does not report the number of likes those states contributed. He says only that in those regions there were more likes for the Cowboys than for any other team.  By this measure, the Steelers don’t even win all Pennsylvania, but that’s because, unlike the Cowboys, the Steelers  face other NFL cities close to home.  Their home state and every bordering state except West Virginia has one or even two competing NFL teams – Eagles, Browns, Bengals, Ravens, Bills.   

The map makes the it appear that the 3.6 million Steeler fans are crowded into a small area while the 3.7 million Cowboy fans are widely spread.  But those wide open Western spaces may not contain all that many people.  And it’s fans, not real estate, that root for a team. 

If you want to know who America’s team is, you should find out how many fans it has outside its local area.  Unfortunately, Blatt doesn’t provide that information. So for a rough estimate, I took the number of Facebook likes and subtracted the metro area population.  Most teams came out on the negative side. The Patriots, for example, had 2.5 million likes. but they are in a media market of over 4 million people.  The Cowboys too wound up in the red  3.7 million likes in a metro area of 5.4 million people.

Likes outnumbered population for only five teams.  The clear winner was the Steelers.*

I made one final comparison –Steeler bars and Cowboys bars in Los Angeles  It’s the second largest media market in the country but hasn’t had a home NFL team to support in nearly two decades (how do economists explain this?).   The Cowboys should have an advantage in LA since more Angelenos have roots in Texas than in Pennsylvania.  According to FanLoop, there are 16 Cowboys bars within a 25-mile radius of 90210 (the first Los Angeles zip code that came to mind).  In that same circle, there are 31 Steelers bars.** 

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* The Packers also have a legitimate claim to the title.  To get the numbers to come out in favor of the Steelers, I assigned the Pack the Milwaukee metro area as its local support even though Milwaukee is 100 miles from Green Bay.  (Milwaukee  is closer to Chicago, but as the map makes clear, Packer and Bear loyalties split at the state line.)  Subtract the Green Bay population instead of Milwaukee from the Packer likes, and the Packers win the America’s Team trophy by two touchdowns.

** I my own zip code +25 miles, the score is Steelers 45, Cowboys 18.  (See this earlier post about Steeler bars.)

UPDATE:  It turns out that a few days ago, an intern at Facebook, Sean Taylor, published data on this same topic (here). Taylor’s map. by county rather than Congressional district, is a bit clearer than the one above.

 

But this repeats the shortcoming of the other map.  It shows which team was most popular, but it does not show the level of support for other teams.  Looking at the map, you would never suspect that the Packers get a lot of love (or rather a lot of likes) nationwide, not just in Wisconsin.  But it’s never enough to overcome the home team advantage. (Note also that the Steelers kick ass even in far away places like Alaska and Hawaii.) 

Bye-bye Hilary

February 1, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

I’m generally skeptical about claims that names in the media have a big impact on parents’ choices of what to name the baby (see this earlier post on “Twilight” names).  But Hilary Parker http://hilaryparker.com/2013/01/30/hilary-the-most-poisoned-baby-name-in-us-history/ points out some examples where celebrity influence is unmistakable.  Like Farrah.

(Click on the graph for a larger view.)

“Charlie’s Angels” came to TV in 1976, and the angel prima inter pares was Farrah Fawcett.  This poster was seemingly everywhere. (And in 1976, that barely noticeable nipple was a big deal.)

But as with most names that rise quickly, Farrah went quickly out of style.  If you see a Farrah on a dating site listing her age as 29, she’s lying by six or seven years. 

Hilary is different.  The name grew gradually in popularity, probably flowing down through the social class system.  There was no sudden burst of popularity caused by the outside force of a celebrity name.  (See Gabriel Rossman’s post on endogenous and exogenous influences.)  Then in 1992, Hilary seemed to have been totally banned from the obstetrics ward. 

Surely, the effect came not from word of mouth but from a prominent Hilary (or in this case, the rarer spelling Hillary), the one who said she wasn't going to stay home and bake cookies..

Maybe now that Hillary is getting a favorable press – good reviews for her stint as Secretary of State – the name might return to its 1980s popularity.

Endowment for the Amenities

January 29, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

When we did the college tours with my son, I was always impressed by the luxury of the facilities – the athletic center (certainly not the “gym”) that rivals the most expensive private clubs, the theaters, the dorm suites, the quality, quantity, and variety of food in the dining halls (not the “cafeteria”).  “When I went to college . . . .”  I didn’t say that, but it’s what I was thinking.

It’s a matter of demand and supply.  As the title of a recent NBER paper puts it:

College as Country Club: Do Colleges Cater to 

Students’ Preferences for Consumption?

The paper is by Brian Jacob, Brian McCall, and Kevin M. Stange, at Michigan.  Did they really need to phrase it as a question?  Here’s part of the abstract.

This paper investigates whether demand-side market pressure explains colleges’ decisions to provide consumption amenities to their students. , , , We find that most students do appear to value college consumption amenities, including spending on student activities, sports, and dormitories. While this taste for amenities is broad-based, the taste for academic quality is confined to high-achieving students. 

Ah yes, the “taste” for academic quality. Or as Perelman said, De gustibus ain’t what dey used to be.

The paper, gated, is here.


HT: Matthew E. Kahn at The Reality Based Community

Cautionary Tale Update – Crime in the UK

January 26, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

Shortly after the Newtown massacre the Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed claiming that Britain and Australia provided “Two Cautionary Tales of Gun Control.”  In 1998, the UK passed a very strict gun law.  The author of the WSJ piece, Joyce Lee Malcolm, concluded: 

Gun crime, not a serious problem in the past, now is.

The actual crime data on those two countries told a different, less cautionary tale (see my blog post). 

The data from 2012 (September 2011 to September 2012) are now in, and the results must be puzzling (maybe even disappointing) to Ms. Malcolm, the NRA, and other gunlovers. 

• The murder rate was down by 10%. 
• The murder rate was lower than in any year since 1978.
• Gun crime was down by 17%, knife crime by 11%. 
• Most other crimes – robbery, burglary, and vehicle-related crimes – were also down. *

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* The report is based on crimes recorded by the police.  It’s possible that the actual number of crimes was unchanged or even higher but that for some reason the police in 2012 decided to be less diligent about recording them.  That seems doubtful, but we must wait for the data from the victimization survey to be sure.  The data on murder, however, are accurate.  Even the most unscrupulous precinct cannot ignore a murder or downgrade it to an assault.

The Guardian story on the crime data is here