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BY HANNAH PURKEY

In print | Published October 8, 2009 — Updated October 22, 2009 12:50

It was a strange comment for a quarterback to make after an exciting one-point victory that helped his team to a No. 11 national ranking.

“The only thing that we’re going to watch on TV from now on is SpongeBob,” said University of Miami quarterback Jacory Harris after leading his team to a 21-20 victory over Oklahoma on Saturday, as reported in The New York Times.

And, no, Harris was not referring to subliminal football plays in Saturday morning cartoons. He was instead suggesting a way to keep his teammates from becoming overwhelmed by the media attention their new national ranking has brought on, a feat made more difficult according to Harris by the new televisions in their locker room that often are tuned to ESPN.

While I don’t especially feel sorry that Harris and his teammates have to avert their eyes from the brand new televisions that the university has provided for them, his comical suggestion brings attention to a much more serious sports psychology phenomenon: the obsession with national and regional rankings of collegiate teams and the possible affects these rankings have on athletes.

One of the odder aspects of the focus on rankings that Harris refers to is that in the history of sports it has been the teams that are not favored that have made the best stories and are remembered the most fondly. Part of the reason why the story of the “Miracle on Ice,” the gold medal win by the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team, is so popular is that nobody thought they had a chance at winning.

This was a group of amateur and college players who could barely get along, playing a Soviet team that had been undefeated for years and was considered the best in the world.

In fact, the historic game between these two teams was not even broadcast live because it was scheduled as an afternoon game when no one thought the Americans actually had a chance to be playing in it.

Beyond just making good sports stories, underdogs have been shown to receive more support from neutral fans than favorites do. A 1991 study done by Frazier and Snyder presented participants with a hypothetical sporting event in which one team was “highly favored” over the other.

The results showed that 81 percent of people presented with this scenario said they preferred to support the team that was not favored to win.

Looking further at the preferential support for underdogs, Vandello and his colleagues, in a paper published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, shed some light on the motivation behind this support. They showed that underdog support was motivated not only by the belief that a team or individual would not win, but also by a perception that their underdog status was caused by some sort of disadvantage they had. Participants’ team choice, therefore, was associated with a need for fairness and justice to prevail.

However, a person’s choice to favor either the underdog or the favorite is also influenced by the perception of the pressures felt by each.

Gibson et al. showed in a 2002 study that favorites were perceived as having more pressure to succeed and therefore were actually more likely to fail because of it. Thus, the choice to support the underdog is not just hopeful wishing but also might be a choice of the team or individual more likely to win.

As a member of the U.S. Olympic committee, Peter Haberl observed these pressures on athletes assumed to be the favorite, and published his findings in Athletic Insight.

Although in some cases, Haberl observed benefits of being the ranked or favored team, like an increased confidence that a favorite athlete could break other athletes psychologically, he also observed the costs of being the favorite, like feeling like the athlete has a target on their back or of being crippled by pressure and expectations.

These concerns of teams favored to win inhibit their ability to perform, according to Haberl. One of the teams he looked at is the U.S. women’s soccer team, quoting Tiffany Milbret as saying of the team’s 2000 Olympic effort, “Being the U.S. team and having all that pressure, we were exhausted. I don’t think as much physically as mentally … I don’t think the team consciously held back. But so much was at stake.”

This idea of having something to lose is expressed by many top-ranked or favored athletes in Haberl’s study. Thus, while many low status groups or teams are susceptible to feeling “self-hate” or self-depreciation, as Vandello et al. found, groups in high status positions are also susceptible to a wide variety of psychological consequences of their perceived position as a favorite.

Considering the high psychological pressure felt by favorites and the tendency for fans to be more supportive of those who are not ranked and who instead serve as the underdog, it is curious that athletes and coaches put so much emphasis on national rankings. Unlike league rankings, which are often based on teams’ records for the current season and only against league opponents, national and regional rankings are decided rather arbitrarily — by a poll of coaches or journalists.

These polls are susceptible to obvious bias based on a team’s history or which teams the deciding coaches have had more contact with. Not to mention the fact that, other than giving them bragging rights, these rankings do not mean much for a team.

Thus, maybe we should be worrying less about whether our favorite teams are cracking the national rankings and more about how they are playing.

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