Overrating Bruins, Underrating Badgers: Media, Bias, and College Basketball

I had never paid much attention to College Basketball until two years ago, when I spent a hot year living in Durham, North Carolina.  There were just too many teams, too many players cycling through the system.  But after watching a few Duke v. UNC or Duke v. Wakeforest games, in a crowded Tobacco Road Sports Cafe, I realized that College Basketball fans mean business.  Big business.

So when this paper, "Overrating Bruins, Underrating Badgers: Media, Bias, and College Basketball" by Daniel Hawkins, Andrew Lindner, and Ryan Larson crossed my desk, I jumped at the chance to publish it in our exciting new Sports journals.

Published today, in The Journal of Sports Management and Commercialization, this article explores the relationship between the media, sports journalism, and the actual records of college basketball teams.

By comparing the preseason and postseason rankings, we construct a measure of how much sports journalists who respond to the poll overrate (or underrate) college teams relative to their actual performance. Using this metric for the 115 NCAA schools that have appeared at least once in the opening or final AP poll in the last 25 years, we examine a range of institutional characteristics that may predict overrating or underrating by members of the sports media.

Check it out in the Journal of Sports Management and Commercialization, Volume 6, Issue 3.