Rabid fans play hard; businesses ultimately win

Editor's note: This story appeared in the March issue of North Idaho Business Journal, which was distributed throughout the region on Feb. 24. For more stories like this, go to: nibusinessjournal.com

Countless economic studies have shown that sports is big business.

But as far as fans go, is sports good for business?

Oh, yeah. Even when your team comes up a yard short or a missed free throw away.

As an avid fan of the Seattle Seahawks and Gonzaga basketball program, Ryan Herzog, Ph.D., has been riding quite the wave of blissful fandom for some time now. An associate professor of economics at Gonzaga since 2009, Herzog earned his master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Oregon, which wields one of the nation’s most dazzling college football teams. In short, the guy who specializes in macroeconomics and managerial economics at GU hasn’t had to swallow the deflated football of gut-wrenching losses very often. Notable exceptions do exist, however, like when Ohio State kicked Herzog’s Ducks right square in the buckeyes, and when the Seahawks fell 36 inches short of Super Bowl immortality.

“Painful couple of weeks for me,” Herzog admits. “My 6-year-old son was crying after that [national championship] game and I had to explain to him, ‘Teams lose.’”

But diehard fans win. And so, as the economist Herzog attests, do the companies that employ them — even when fans are glued to TV or computer screens during March Madness, the NCAA basketball tourney.

“I don’t see the cost to business in terms of the lost productivity because I think across the board, most people have a job to do,” Herzog says. “If they spend time talking about a football game or they’re talking about basketball, they’ve still got to get their job done. They’ve still got to go to their meetings, meet with customers, make phone calls, do whatever.

“These studies that say, ‘Oh, if I spent two hours watching basketball, that means the company lost out on $50 of my work. Multiply that by the 150 million people in the economy. . .’ — I don’t think it works that way. I think you’re seeing a lot of the positives in terms of building friendships, building morale, building a sense of community for sports, especially college sports.”

Dr. Eric Heidenreich of Coeur d’Alene agrees. A psychiatrist at Kootenai Health who played college football and, like Herzog, is a Washington native who roots for the Zags and Hawks, Heidenreich acknowledges that hard data is elusive in attempting to link fandom and employer prosperity. But one key link, he says, is irrefutable.

“There’s plenty of correlation between happiness and productivity, and there’s certainly a lot of correlation between sports and community involvement or a sense of community,” Heidenreich says. “People for the most part are social beings. A sense of connectiveness helps their sense of security and happiness.”

The ticket to that connectiveness is cheap and abundant, too.

“People like to be part of something,” Heidenreich says. “Sports gives you easy entry — there’s no prequalification, no test to get in. You simply have to buy the hat or buy the shirt or buy the ticket to be a Seahawk fan.”

Herzog punched his ticket to connectiveness and once-in-a-lifetime happiness last year. Meeting his father and two brothers in New York, he attended the Super Bowl that saw the Seahawks destroy the Denver Broncos, 43-8. Now he’s enjoying connectiveness somewhat differently — and definitely earlier in the day.

At Gonzaga, staff and faculty have access to single-game basketball tickets that are in great demand. But to buy them, they’ve got to get in line at 2 or 3 on sometimes bitter cold winter mornings. Herzog speaks glowingly of the camaraderie that’s built in those collegial lines, and there’s additional benefit as well.

“You talk about productivity,” he says with a laugh. “I’ve gotten in that morning line more than a couple of times. You bring a chair, you bring a laptop, and at 3 or 4 in the morning, you’re working. What else are you going to do at 4 in the morning?”

For Herzog, his very livelihood is linked at least indirectly to Gonzaga’s basketball success.

“I was hired in a big growth period at Gonzaga,” he says. “Would that growth period have occurred without the success of the basketball team? It’s hard to be sure, but in hindsight, basketball success put Gonzaga on a national map.”

While crediting admissions and administration at GU for boosting the school’s academic profile, Herzog gives the hoopsters a mighty assist.

“We have kids coming from Florida, from the East Coast,” he says. “I think it made the name ‘Gonzaga’ easier to recognize for students all across the country. I think they’re coming here. . . because of our academic reputation, but they’re hearing of us because of basketball initially.”

Winning like Gonzaga and Seattle is great, but, apologies to Coach Lombardi, it isn’t the only thing. Even when teams fall short of their ultimate goals, there’s benefit to fans and, by extension, the businesses that employ them, Herzog and Heidenreich agree. And even when there’s a little heartache or headache along the way.

“To the extent that your team’s playing in the Super Bowl [or the NCAA Tournament], the parties are a little bit bigger and people are calling in sick the next day or are hung over the next day,” Herzog says. “I think that’s probably some of the bigger cost — the lost productivity the day after. But I think you still have the ‘We all lost together’ sort of compassion with each other, which is a real positive.”

Lovable losers can be good for business too. Heidenreich repeats a time-tested truth, one ingrained in the DNA of every Chicago Cubs fan.

“Misery loves company,” he says. “You don’t have to have a successful season to get that sense of community and commonness and camaraderie. The mutual suffering can give a sense of involvement to the community as well. Community is an idea as much as it’s a place.”

Starting in the late 1920s, Heidenreich says, a classic sociological study was done in Muncie, Indiana. Researchers called it “Middletown” to represent an average American town or small city.

“They weren’t sports people,” Heidenreich says of the researchers, “but they kind of studied the effect of automobile and radio technology fragmenting society much like we talk about the Internet today.”

In the quest to learn what was ripping communities apart, Heidenreich says, they also discovered what held them together.

“They found out that high school basketball did,” he says.

Ultimately, that sense of togetherness is what helps individuals, communities and, yes, even businesses succeed.

“How many times have you heard people talking about the Seahawks saying, ‘We won!’ Heidenreich says. “That’s automatic inclusion. It’s not, ‘They won,’ but ‘We won.’”

And the smart money says, so did their employers.