Evaluating the effect of an NCAA Tournament run like George Mason’s is sort of like grading draft classes: you have to wait a few years. But we’ve had some time pass since Mason made it to the 2006 Final Four and the Epoch Times has some incredible numbers on what playing into college basketball’s final weekend did for the university.
George Mason’s NCAA Tournament Run Produced Staggering Attention
⇥[George Mason University Center for Sport Management director Robert] Baker found that requests for information about GMU jumped by 350 percent. Applications from out-of-state students swelled by 40 percent and all freshman year applications increased by 22 percent. Computer-generated applications rose by 52 percent and alumni interest in the school jumped by 25 percent.⇥⇥Page views on the sports division’s website soared by 503 percent and unique viewers by 702 percent. Almost everything that had to do with GMU’s sports division rose drastically. More season tickets for games were sold and home games were packed with fans wanting to see the game.⇥
⇥⇥Most importantly, GMU earned roughly $678 million in totality, factoring in free local, regional, and national print and electronic media coverage, due to its game exposure. That’s serious money for any university.⇥
I always think the last bit about publicity being equated to money is kind of dubious, because it's not the same as buying time on TV, targeting an audience and spreading it out over time. Instead, there was a flood of attention for George Mason in one domain of the world -- the sports domain -- and it was over within a month or so.
But that being said, the other numbers are astonishing. Each figure is impressive on its own, but when you put them all together, you get a sense of what a landmark moment it is for a mid-major school to make a Final Four. Although I can’t find the exact numbers, I recall both Valparaiso and Miami-Ohio touting similar stories of success when they made a splash in the NCAA Tournament on the backs of players like Bryce Drew and Wally Szczerbiak. The avalanche of attention also gives us an idea of what a gamble every school takes by trying to play with the big boys in college hoops. If you don’t get this kind of attention, you end up like a lot of schools spending a lot of money for some very fleeting fame and very little return overall.
(H/T to Rush The Court)
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