An LSU economics professor has completed a study he says statistically proves Boise State is the most hated college football team in the country, with LSU placing 32nd on the list.
Professor Sudipta Sarangi’s study, “Everybody Hates a Winner, and You are Close to Your Rival: A Study of Rivalry in College Football,” will be published in an upcoming issue of Economic Inquiry, a peer-reviewed academic journal published quarterly by Wiley-Blackwell.
“We all had a lot of fun working on this paper,” Sarangi says in an LSU news release issued today. “(This paper) tells us that economics can be used to study all kinds of interesting things and that research can be fun. Hopefully, it will excite more students to study economics.”
Sarangi wrote the study with University of Arkansas professors Cary Deck and Javier Reyes, as well as University of Arkansas-Little Rock assistant professor Sarah Quintar, who is a former LSU economics student.
Sarangi and his colleagues sought to explain what factors drive a rivalry by examining it through the lens of college football. Specifically, they wanted to understand whether the same factors that go into rivalries between nations or siblings also drive those in sports. They drew their conclusions by analyzing conference-level data from a survey of college football fans.
For instance, when analyzing the survey results by using the Herfindahl Index—traditionally used as a business measure of the size of a firm in relation to its industry and the amount of competition it faces—Boise State tops the list of most-hated teams, followed by Brigham Young University, West Virginia, Middle Tennessee State University and Fresno State University.
LSU would be No. 32, behind four other Southeastern Conference teams—the University of Tennessee, Alabama, the University of Florida and the University of Georgia.
“This is a paper for all Tiger fans,” says Sarangi, adding, “It also helped us settle some arguments that we as co-authors were having about college football rivalries.”
