What do you figure the odds are that Greg McGarity reads Bill King’s latest column?
Determining which teams have the best fan bases might seem the subject of a bar room debate, but marketing professor Mike Lewis of Emory’s Goizueta Business School has been tracking fan bases, both pro and college, for years, and publishes annual rankings based on scientific metrics.
… Actually, Georgia’s 2018 ranking of 6th is down a bit from 5 years ago, when the Bulldogs ranked first in the SEC and second nationally, behind only Texas. That drop seemed a little surprising to me, considering Kirby Smart’s program has been considerably improved in on-field results over the past couple of seasons, and Georgia’s fan base has drawn national raves for the way it showed up en masse on the road at places like Notre Dame and the Rose Bowl.
But, Lewis told me, it’s “not really slippage — [the UGA] fan base is still amazingly supportive. It’s because the revenue has not moved up at the same rate as the performance.”
Lewis said that is “probably due to the athletic department not rapidly increasing prices. I’m in Atlanta, so I understand the serious passion of that fan base — I suspect UGA could increase revenues pretty easily.”
So, yes, I guess fans should be grateful the UGA Athletic Association is not charging as much for tickets as Lewis thinks it could.
The next McGarity’s Minutes almost writes itself, doesn’t it? (Although it’ll probably ignore the second half of King’s piece, which concludes with “… it still wouldn’t be a bad idea for the folks who run UGA athletics to provide a bit more TLC for that fan base — and pay more attention to its concerns — so Bulldog Nation remains as fiercely loyal as it’s been up to now.“)