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Empirical studies reveal Black male student-athletes have both positive and negative experiences on predominantly White college and university campuses. Mindful also of race-based stereotypic beliefs about Black male student-athletes in collegiate sports, these phenomena warrant further discourse and scrutiny. Critical race theory is a race-centered theoretical and analytical framework that has shaped discourse on race and racism in intercollegiate athletics in recent years. Discourse in this chapter is therefore grounded in the narrative of critical race theory and focuses primarily on the academic and athletic plight of Black male student-athletes matriculating at predominantly White colleges and universities with National Collegiate Athletic Association affiliation.

Purpose: The purpose of the study was to gain insight into fans' perceptions, attitudes and behavioural responses toward their favourite college football team in the context of a new beer sponsorship agreement. Specifically, the chapter examines differences in fans' attitudes and behaviours based on their gender, team identification and drinking habits.

Design/methodology/approach: A quantitative, cross-sectional survey design was employed. The sample was comprised of Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) workers who self-identified as college football fans. A hypothetical scenario was used as a manipulation, whereby participants were asked to imagine their favourite college football team had entered into a new alcohol sponsorship agreement while completing a questionnaire.

Findings: Highly identified fans exhibited more positive attitudes and behaviours after being presented with the hypothetical scenario than less identified fans. In terms of gender, female fans had increased attitudes toward sponsorship compared to males, and highly identified females had the most positive attitudes and behavioural intentions toward their favourite teams of any of the four subgroups in the study.

Research limitations/implications: The small sample sizes of some fan subgroups affected statistical power, which may have led to falsely insignificant findings. The range of favourite teams among the participants (50 universities) meant there was likely a high degree of variation between fans' previous experiences with beer/alcohol at college sport venues.

Originality/value: The study offers valuable insight into the intersection of sport fandom and gender in the context of alcohol sponsorship in US college sport, and is also among the first investigations of the effects of team identification on perceptions toward alcohol sponsorship.

The objective of this paper is to respond to four research questions. The first two as how likely are college football season ticket holders to recommend (1) purchasing a similar season ticket package and (2) attending a home football game, to a friend or colleague. The third question examines if there is a difference between advocacy toward purchasing season tickets as compared to advocacy toward game attendance. Finally, we identify what factors impact advocacy for college football season ticket holders.

An online survey of 57,240 season ticket holders from 69 different National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA) Division I Football Bowl Subdivision programs was undertaken. The data were analyzed to build a model of the drivers of advocacy in season ticket holders from a conceptual base of advocacy, trust and loyalty.

The identified drivers include both institutionally influenced factors and factors related to season ticket holder behaviors/demographics. The season ticket holder is arguably the highest level of fan for any sports organization from an affinity perspective and clearly the most important from a business perspective. This research argues that the season ticket holder should not only be the focus of ticket sales efforts but also leveraged as marketing advocates with the objective of attracting additional fans.

The value of this research is the large sample of data from season ticket holders of NCAA Division 1 football clubs and the resulting learning it provides to researchers and practitioners.

Intercollegiate athletics is a tremendous part of today’s society and encompasses numerous American lives. Its wide spectrum attracts various people from gender, race, ethnicity, cultures, religion, and sexuality. Black male student-athletes, a target of higher education institutions, are affected by sociological, institutional, and athletic factors. This population is highly sought after by college coaches due to their athletic abilities and ability skills in their specific sport in order to elevate their respective sports team, athletics’ department, and university into the national limelight. Current institutional and intercollegiate athletics’ trends that are incorporated to recruit Black male student-athletes are explored. Specific recruiting techniques utilized by college coaches to persuade this population are examined. The sociological issues in current intercollegiate athletics are analyzed with their direct effect on the college selection choice of Black male student-athletes.

In the 1980s, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) passed several eligibility rules to address concerns about the academic and personal development of its participants (Gaston-Gayles, 2009). Despite garnering publicity, fostering school pride, providing entertainment, and generating billions of dollars in revenue for the Division I-affiliated institutions they attend (Sylwester, M., & Witosky, T. (2004). Athletic spending grows as academic funds dry up. USAToday.com , February 18. Retrieved from http://www.usatoday.com/sports/college/2004-02-18-athletic-spending- cover_x.htm), student-athletes are prevented from receiving compensation beyond athletic scholarships by the NCAA’s amateurism principle. Consequently, the ethical question at the center of college sports is: how do participants benefit from the college experience relative to their non-sport peers? While the NCAA typically reports benefits, research that disaggregates the data by sport, division, race, and sex reveals long-standing and pervasive inequities (Harper, Williams, & Blackman, 2013). Accordingly, this chapter juxtaposes NCAA’s rhetoric, principles, and espoused goals with the lived realities of the most populous demographic group within high revenue-generating collegiate sports, Black male student-athletes.

This study assessed the intergenerational influence of family socialization, specifically, nurturant fathering – the affective quality fathers provide children through warmth and acceptance – to explore how individuals initially connect with a sports team to become team-loyal.

Data were collected via an online survey from respondents self-described as college football fans who selected their “Favorite NCAA Division I football team.” The 623 respondents subsequently selected their biological father's favorite team. An intergenerational “match” between father and child served as the dependent variable. Step-wise logistic regression assessed the relationship that team loyalty, nurturant fathering, and their interaction had on the intergenerational matching of a father's favorite team.

Team loyalty had a significant, positive relationship with an intergenerational match. A positive but weak direct relationship was found between nurturant fathering and a favorite-team match. However, nurturant fathering significantly moderated the relationship between team loyalty and intergenerational match. This suggests that the quality of a father-child relationship during the child's formative years can facilitate team loyalty to a team favored by the father.

The strength and quality of the relationship between a father and his children through nurturant fathering during their formative years can facilitate mutual team loyalty toward a college football team if not directly, then indirectly, through an interaction effect with a parent-socialized, team-loyal child.

College athletic teams, and sports properties in general, should address the bond between fathers and their children to take advantage of the intergenerational transference process identified in this study through targeted, family-focused sports marketing. More specifically, university athletic departments should engage in marketing efforts that encourage and solidify the mutual loyalty fathers and children may have to their father's favorite football team. The outcome would be a competitive advantage that leads to the cultivation of long-lasting fans from generation to generation.

College football teams and sports properties in general should engage in father-child marketing promotions to encourage and enhance the intergenerational influence of fathers on their children with respect to the father's favorite team. However, while building future team loyalty among the children, these marketing promotions and the resultant father-child game attendance concurrently reinforce the father-child relationship. This ideally leads to a virtuous cycle of parental bonding and team loyalty.

This study extends research in intergenerational influence in a sports setting by introducing the construct of Nurturant Fathering and its scale to the sports marketing literature. The results found that a nurturing father can facilitate the formation of a mutual team loyalty between a father and his child with regard to the father's favorite football team. Extant research has focused on the behavioral elements of loyalty (e.g. attendance and revenues). This study's focus was on the attitudinal aspects of team loyalty. It empirically identified, at least in part, how individuals initially connect with a sports team to become team-loyal.

The overrepresentation and lack of academic success for Black male athletes on college campuses are problems that warrant attention in the 21st century. A recent report from the University of Pennsylvania shows that over the four-year period between 2007 and 2010, Black males were overrepresented in college sports (Harper, Williams, & Blackman, 2013), a startling reality considering that Black males are severely underrepresented in the general student body. Further complicating matters is the fact that Black male student-athletes do not graduate from college at rates comparable to their peers (Harper et al., 2013). Focused primarily on the experiences of Division I Black male student-athletes, this chapter begins with an overview of literature relevant to successful academic support programs. The authors also present an overview of best practices for advising African American male student-athletes, derived from athletic departments with a demonstrated record of academic success for Black males.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the drivers of NCAA Football Bowl Subdivision total revenues from the 2007 to 2012 seasons.

The author uses both ordinary least squares and quantile regression to estimate the impact that winning and lagged attendance have on real total revenue.

The author finds that the marginal revenue of winning changes substantially from one end of the conditional distribution to the other end of the conditional distribution but the marginal revenue of lagged attendance is more consistent as compared to winning.

This will have implications for researchers investigating NCAA football coaches’ salaries and NCAA football player valuation.

On a home game weekend of collegiate football, thousands of fan visitors spend their weekend participating in college football games, showing significant potential of sports tourism businesses in the USA. Understanding the original personality of sport tourists and their travel motivation factors is imperative to develop appealing tourist attractions at the destinations of sports team fandoms. The purpose of the study is to examine the relationships among tourists' personality characteristics, their push and pulls motivations, satisfaction with travel experience, and loyalty toward destination and team using structural equation modeling.

The author collected information from a total of 301 sports tourists who had traveled to a college football game within the past year, staying at least one night in a hotel or other lodging place. This study employed PASW Statistics 25.0 and structural equation modeling using LISREL 9.30 for data analyses.

Personality has a significant relationship with push factors, especially for socialization motivation, and pull factors (i.e. access and affordability, other attractions) had more significant effects on sports tourists' satisfaction than push factors. The findings indicate the key roles for the entertainment motivation in generating tourists' satisfaction and destination loyalty and important roles of destination loyalty in building team loyalty.

The present study provides an approach of sports tourists' travel behaviors and experiences in the sporting event tourism. The outcome of this research can help both sports event organizers and destination marketers to understand the motivations for sports game attendance and to develop marketing strategies and products/services for attracting various types of sports tourists to games.

Previous research on rivalry games in sport has predominantly focused on understanding the nature of these games and their effects on consumer behavior. As such, the purpose of this paper is to conduct an empirical examination to provide better theoretical and empirical understanding of how rivalries may impact the posting of content online.

This research utilizes Twitter data measuring the number of posts by individuals about college football teams to model how often fans create content during game days. The models in this study were estimated using fixed-effects panel regressions.

After controlling for a number of factors, including the type of rivalry game, results indicate fans post more during traditional rivalries. Furthermore, newer rivalry games had less impact on the amount of content posted about a team.

The findings from this research provide sport marketers with important information regarding fan use of digital platforms. Notably, the results suggest rivalries can help to boost the volume of content individuals post about a team, indicating these games provide teams with an opportunity to maximize their engagement with fans and focus on key marketing objectives.

To date, there has been little examination considering whether rivalries affect behaviors in the digital realm. Therefore, the current investigation is one of the first studies to examine how rivalries impact social media behavior.