Who won the big game? Student clothing tells the tale

Who won the big game? Student clothing tells the tale

Fans of winning teams want to 'bask in reflected glory'

Note: This is an updated version of a story first published Jan. 8, 2015

COLUMBUS, Ohio - The victor of Monday's college national football championship will be written all over the clothing of students at The Ohio State University on Tuesday, research suggests.

If you see students decked out in Ohio State sweatshirts, hats and other gear on Tuesday, you'll know the Buckeyes prevailed over Notre Dame.

If Buckeye clothing is scarce, well … assume the worst.

But it is not just Buckeyes who choose their apparel based on the success of their favorite team.

A 2015 study of students at seven universities - including Ohio State - found that students were more than twice as likely to wear their team's apparel on the first class meeting after a football team win.

"People want to be associated with winners. It makes you feel better about yourself, even if you are only a fan," said Brian Turner, co-author of the study and professor of sport management at Ohio State's College of Education and Human Ecology.

"It is what we call BIRGing - Basking in Reflected Glory."

Losing changed how students dressed. Results showed that students were 55% less likely to wear their team's apparel after a loss.

Turner conducted the research - a replication of a famous study done more than 40 years ago - with Jonathan Jensen, who was a doctoral student at Ohio State at the time. Jensen is now associate director of the Center for Sport Management Research and Education at Texas A&M University. They presented their research at a conference of the North American Society for Sport Management.

The study was done during the 2013 football season at Ohio State, Minnesota, Indiana, Louisiana State, Florida State, Louisville and Syracuse.

The Ohio State researchers recruited faculty from each school to count how many of their students were wearing their university's apparel during the first class meeting after each football game during that season, resulting in more than 3,200 unique datapoints.

Overall, students at the seven universities wore school-affiliated apparel about 27% of the time.

Some students - about 6.7% of them - went all out and actually wore more than one piece of team apparel. A team win made the odds of wearing two items of apparel more than three times as likely, the research showed.

This study replicates a study by Robert Cialdini, now a professor emeritus at Arizona State University, that was conducted in 1973. Cialdini collected the data while he was a visiting assistant professor of psychology at Ohio State.

Cialdini was the one who coined the term "basking in reflected glory," Turner said. The study has become a classic in the field of consumer behavior.

"It is the most cited and well-known study in sports marketing," Turner said.

Turner, Jensen and James Evans, now at Indiana University, authored another related study published in 2023 that found that the expectancies of fans helped determine how much BIRGing they did after a win.

That research found that fans of teams expected to lose a game - but then won - did not BIRG by wearing their team's apparel as much as fans of teams who won a game they were expected to win.

Turner said the researchers believe that these fans didn't want to celebrate too much, in the event their team returned to their losing ways.

"When teams are not accustomed to winning, the fans might not want to get overly excited about a win, because they might expect to be heartbroken in the future," Turner said.

But this study was done during the regular season and included some teams that weren't familiar with victories. Even though Notre Dame is the underdog in the national championship game, Turner expects their fans will do plenty of BIRGing if they win.

"Notre Dame, like Ohio State, is accustomed to winning," he said.

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