LSU is No. 32 most disliked team in the country

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BATON ROUGE – Three things have now been statistically proven by LSU Economics Professor Sudipta Sarangi and his cohorts – Boise State is the most hated college football team in the country, the strongest football rivalry between two universities is Central Michigan University versus Western Michigan University and the strongest rivalry in the Southeastern Conference is between the University of Alabama and the University of Auburn.

LSU is the No. 32 most disliked team in the country and its fiercest rivalry is with the University of Mississippi – that feud is No. 50 in terms of the nation’s strongest college football rivalry.

In “Everybody Hates a Winner, and You are Close to Your Rival: A Study of Rivalry in College Football,” which will be published in an upcoming issue of Economic Inquiry, Sarangi and his colleagues sought to explain what factors drive a rivalry. By examining it through the lens of college football, they tried to understand whether the same factors that go into rivalries between nations or siblings also drive those in sports.

“This is a paper for all Tiger fans,” said Sarangi, who wrote the paper along with University of Arkansas Professors Cary Deck and Javier Reyes and University of Arkansas – Little Rock Assistant Professor Sarah Quintar, who is a former LSU economics student.

“We all had a lot of fun working on this paper,” Sarangi added. “(This paper) tells us that economics can be used to study all kinds of interesting things and that research can be fun. Hopefully, it will excite more students to study economics.

“It also helped us settle some arguments that we as co-authors were having about college football rivalries.”

Through the use of conference-level data from a survey of college football fans, the group of authors came to a number of conclusions.

For instance, looking at the Herfindahl Index – Sarangi said think of it as market share – of a team’s rivalry within its conference, Boise State would be at the top of the list, followed by Brigham Young University, West Virginia, Middle Tennessee State University and Fresno State University.

LSU, as mentioned before, would be No. 32, behind four other SEC teams – the University of Tennessee, Alabama, the University of Florida and the University of Georgia.

Examining pairwise rivalries, Central and Western Michigan top the list, as stated earlier. In the SEC, Alabama-Auburn is the most heated, ranking No. 16 nationally.

One final conclusion from the data, which will not surprise Tiger fans, shows that LSU supporters harbor “rivalrous” but not strong feelings toward the University of Mississippi – those feelings are saved for Alabama.

The Department of Economics at LSU’s E. J. Ourso College of Business offers courses that provide undergraduate and graduate students an intellectual challenge and strong analytic training and the tools to address the economic and social problems faced both domestically and internationally. The faculty’s dedication to quality teaching and research is reflected by numerous awards received and peer-reviewed scholarly articles published in high-quality economic journals. The Journal of Labor Research and the Journal of Macroeconomics, two highly regarded academic journals, are edited within the department.

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