With the recent announcement of Calipari as the new coach of my beloved Kentucky Wildcats, there has been an resurgence of the myth in the national media that Kentucky fans are too extreme and out of touch with reality. The myth states that we ran Tubby out of town because the entire fan base hated the man for not winning 10 national championships. I don't believe this myth is true. When Tubby left most people I know were upset that he left. Most people I know thought that Gillespie deserved more time. I am telling you, the vast majority of Kentucky fans are rationale human beings with realistic expectations for their program.
However, I do think I know why this myth keeps being retold and I have numbers to prove it. Rivals is the largest college basketball website out there and has a fan forum for each NCAA team. It also happens to be the place where the pundits pull quotes from "crazy Kentucky fans". One handy metric is that each of the forums have at the top of the page a counter which lists the record for the number of fans visiting its forum at one time. I don't think it is too far a stretch to suggest that a fan that creates an account and logs in to a basketball forum is a "hardcore" fan. Most people watch the team on TV and maybe wear a hat with the logo; but, most aren't logging into an online forum to follow the latest rumors.
So lets take a look at the most people logged into the rivals forum for some of college's elite programs.
Duke 1218
North Carolina 1885
UConn 305
Florida (They don't even have a basketball forum, just football and "Other Sports")
Kansas 383
Michigan State 1039
Arizona 641
Maryland 727
Syracuse 1101
Now let's look at Kentucky's record.
Kentucky 22215
You read that right. Twenty-two Thousand Two Hundred Fifteen. So, for our experiment, lets say that one percent of these "hardcore" fans are complete whack jobs. The kind of nuts that need psychiatric help and will say truly outlandish stuff. If you are Duke, you have 1.2 nuts, North Carolina 1.8, etc. However, Kentucky would have 222 of these nuts saying crazy things. So when you hear ESPN read these outlandish comments, keep in mind that they don't represent the entire fan base, it just seems like we have more of them, because there are more UK fans.
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1 comment:
Very well put. People outside KY often fail to realize how many UK fans there really are, and that we're called Big Blue Nation for that very reason - that at any given time, the population of a single website devoted to the discussion of our basketball team can rival the population of, say, Liechtenstein.
And that's what we call "a hell of a thing."
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