Common sense suggests two big-name, powerhouse teams meeting deep in the playoffs would garner the highest TV ratings. A recent study by Brigham Young University, however, found the opposite to be true for NCAA basketball - the Cinderella teams generate the biggest ratings boost.
Research by BYU statistics professor Scott Grimshaw found that a NCAA Men's Final Four game featuring an underdog from a smaller school, a Cinderella team, has a 35 percent larger TV audience than a game featuring two big-name schools.
"The Cinderella teams, with all the national media attention they get, become a national star," Grimshaw told the BYU website. "It's not that these schools have an established national fan base, it's that the NCAA tournament celebrates the Cinderella more so than other sports."
The 35 percent jump translates 3 million more viewers for a Final Four game and 4.5 million more viewers for the championship game, according to the BYU news release.
Grimshaw's study, published in the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sport, used the Nielsen TV ratings of 30 Final Four games from 2003-12 to determine how valuable each team was in terms of its TV popularity.
If two Cinderella teams meet in the Final Four, there's an even bigger ratings boost. The 2011 semifinal game between VCU and Butler, for example, netted nearly 11 million viewers. Although it has never happened, Grimshaw's model predicts that a championship game between two Cinderella teams would have an 81 percent larger audience.
For most sports, research provided three reasons for why fans watch: big-market teams, big-name stars and competitive matches. Grimshaw's study dispelled all but the latter reason for why fans tune in to NCAA tournament games.
"Our paper was myth-busting to a certain degree because two of those three assumptions are wrong in college basketball," Grimshaw said. "The top 10 teams in terms of national importance had no national effect on TV ratings, though they all had a strong local following."
While the model cannot definitively say why it's different for the NCAA tournaments, the co-author of the study, Paul Sabin, has a hypothesis.
"Our research can't answer definitively why Cinderella's are more popular for fans, though it does prove they are," Sabin said. "By the time the tournament reaches the Final Four, most fans' local teams have been eliminated. It's plausible that interest for casual fans decreases as a result, but that Cinderella's provide them the motivation to tune in and root for the little guy."
