Money-Back Guarantee (Gwen Moritz Editor’s Note)

Arkansas Razorbacks fans cheer at a 2008 game against Ole Miss.

Sometimes I think I’m missing out on something by not being a sports fan. And sometimes I think I’m lucky.

I read a 2016 article by Brian Barth in Nautilus, a science magazine, about the psychological and physiological effects of spectator sports on fans who are “highly identified” with a team. Winning gives male fans a burst of extra testosterone, which is associated with a feeling of self-esteem, that is similar to that experienced by the winning athletes.

Fans are more likely to wear team colors and gear the day after a win than after a loss. This phenomenon was given a name by Arizona State University psychology and marketing professor Robert Cialdini: basking in reflected glory, or “BIRGing.” Cialdini defined it as “publicly announcing one’s association with successful others even though [one] … has done nothing to bring about the other’s success.”

Losing fans, meanwhile, have common coping mechanisms, starting with CORFing: cutting off reflected failure. “BIRGers will say, ‘We crushed them,’” Barth wrote, “while CORFers invariably distance themselves from the failure: ‘They blew it.’”

Building on Cialdini’s theories, Daniel Wann, a social psychologist at Murray State University in Kentucky, has designed more than 20 studies of sports fans and concluded that identifying with a team really can enhance overall mental health. According to Barth’s article, Wann’s “Team Identification-Social Psychological Health Model” identified nearly two dozen “well-being benefits” commonly associated with sports fans, including a sense of belonging, a greater feeling of trust and heightened self-worth. The more intense the fan’s identification with a team, the more pronounced the psychological effects.

Barth said similar phenomena “can be observed in other instances of strong identification with a group, whether a gang or a church congregation, though few cultural institutions today have as many die-hard adherents. (Political tribalism might be close. I definitely don’t think I’m missing anything there.)

While Barth’s article didn’t make this distinction, it’s my impression that disappointed fans are less willing to blame losses on college players — they’re kids and amateurs, after all — than on fabulously well-paid professional players. Instead, the blame, even for individual performance failures, rests with the fabulously well-paid coaches who are responsible for recruiting individual talent and for coaxing the best performance out of that talent. The coaching staff blew it, not the young athletes.

I’ll bet you know where I’m going with this. Arkansans generally are “highly identified” sports fans and have one unifying team: the Razorbacks. To live in Arkansas is to root for the Hogs or to be a perpetual outsider. Watching Arkansans over the past eight football seasons, since Bobby Petrino was fired for exceptionally good cause, it’s obvious that our state is suffering from some kind of testosterone deficit. There just haven’t been enough wins to keep those good feelings flowing — not even enough to keep hope alive.

So Chad Morris, hired with fanfare at the end of 2017, had to go, no matter the cost, which looks to be about $10 million (not including the $7 million he was already paid to lose 18 of 22 games). The buyout represents more than 200 years of earnings for the median Arkansas household.

Now, I understand that the emotional well-being of hundreds of thousands of Arkansans is a valuable commodity. I’ll even accept that a winning coach is a very expensive thing. But does a losing coach, one who creates such palpable misery, have to be so expensive? Is there no way to craft a contract that doesn’t add financial insult to psychological injury when the university makes a hiring mistake?

Disappointed often enough, according to Cialdini’s theory, fans of losing teams will progress from CORFing to basking in reflected failure (“the underdog mentality”) and cutting off future failure, which is refusing to get one’s hopes up even when one’s favorite team starts to win. I’ve observed a lot of BIRFing and COFFing after decades of marriage to a long-suffering Pittsburgh Pirates fan, but it seems that Razorbacks fans are not quite ready to embrace perpetual underdog status.

Photos of the anemic crowd that assembled in Fayetteville to see the Hogs blown out by the same Western Kentucky team that the University of Central Arkansas Bears beat in Bowling Green reminded me that only two University of Arkansas trustees voted against borrowing $120 million to expand Razorback Stadium back in 2016. David Pryor and Cliff Gibson seem smarter with every passing week, don’t they?

Email Gwen Moritz, editor of Arkansas Business, at GMoritz@ABPG.com and follow her on Twitter at @gwenmoritz.