The Tribal Advantage

My uncle Ray was from Long Island. He grew up there, went away to Michigan for college, then came home and spent his career as a schoolteacher. His brother had played football at Michigan in the 1950s, so the connection ran through the family, but Ray's life was in New York.

Except Ray was a Michigan man. Not a Michigan fan. A Michigan man. There is a difference, though I'm not sure I understood how big the difference was until I started thinking about him recently.

Ray could have lived another hundred years, and I don't think Michigan would have left him. Players left. Coaches left. Presidents left. The kids wearing the helmets were born, grew up, played four years, and disappeared while Ray kept wearing Michigan. Michigan got him when he was young and somehow became part of who he was.

That's one hell of a trick, and professional sports teams spend billions trying to do it. They build palaces, hire agencies, redesign logos, blast music at you between every play, create loyalty programs, and produce enough branded content to make you consider throwing your phone into the ocean. A university gives you a roommate.

I live in North Carolina now, in the Triangle, where three major universities sit close enough to one another to create a kind of permanent low-grade hostility. There is Duke, the elite private school filled with rich kids, Northeasterners, and future investment bankers who learned the word “summer” as a verb. There is Carolina, the great public university filled with smart kids and North Carolina kids who will politely explain why their school is better while pretending they aren't explaining why their school is better.

Then there is NC State. Engineers. Agriculture. Practical people. The guy who can actually fix the tractor while the Duke kid creates a financial model for the tractor, and the Carolina kid explains the tractor's historical significance.

These are stereotypes. Calm down. But they also explain why college sports are such a fascinating case study. Geography is built in. Generations of families attend the same schools. Kids grow up wanting to wear the uniform. Rivalries are inherited. Heroes change every four years, but the stories never stop accumulating. Long before the opening tip, almost every ingredient of belonging is already there.

One idea of who “we” are is playing against an idea of who “they” are. The players are almost incidental.

That's become particularly obvious now that college athletes move around like consultants chasing a better compensation package. Duke had a quarterback put together a stellar season and then leave for Miami, another school in the ACC. Duke fans did not follow him to Miami. They didn't order orange shirts and start researching South Beach. They got pissed and, I suspect, immediately looked for the Miami game on the schedule. Yesterday he was ours. Now he's theirs. Welcome to rivalry.

This is where college sports gets weird, particularly compared with professional sports. LeBron James can change teams and take an audience with him. Lionel Messi moves to Miami, and suddenly people on the other side of the planet own pink shirts. Cristiano Ronaldo has fans who seem willing to follow him to whatever country is currently signing the check.

College players leave every year, but the tribe stays. Michigan doesn't need its quarterback to explain Michigan to Michigan people. Carolina doesn't need a point guard to explain Carolina. NC State certainly doesn't need anyone to remind State fans that the rest of the world is conspiring to disrespect NC State. The school comes first, and maybe that's why I keep thinking about Indiana football.

Indiana football was bad. Not “we're rebuilding” bad or “the coach needs another recruiting class” bad. Indiana football spent generations giving its fans perfectly reasonable excuses to rake leaves on Saturdays. Indiana was a basketball school.

Then they hired the right coach and started winning, and the whole place lost its fucking mind. The stadium filled. People were singing and dancing in the streets. Indiana football suddenly had all the outward signs of a rabid football culture. Where the hell did all those people come from?

They didn't come from anywhere. They were already there. Indiana did not build a football fan base in two years. It activated one.

The football team had been terrible, but Indiana was still Indiana. The students were there. The alumni were there. The colors, songs, campus, history, and memories were there. Parents were still sending their kids to Bloomington, and kids were still going home with Indiana sweatshirts. Football sucked, but the tribe survived.

I've written before that belonging is an insurance policy against losing. Indiana made me realize I hadn't said that quite right. Belonging doesn't insure you against losing. It insures the relationship against losing.

If Indiana football were just a product, the market should have killed it years ago. Consumers had options. Every Saturday there were better football teams playing better football in better games. Change the channel. Buy another shirt. Pick a winner. That's what rational consumers do. Fans are idiots. I say that with love because I am one.

The Indiana community could stop showing up for football without stopping being Indiana. The relationship went dormant. It didn't die. Then the football got good and all that stored emotion had somewhere to go.

This is where the businesspeople should probably put down their spreadsheets for a minute. Do you know how expensive it is to acquire a customer? Do you know how hard it is to get someone who stopped caring to care again? Indiana had generations of people sitting there, emotionally attached to the institution, waiting for football to give them a reason. The asset already existed. Someone finally turned it on.

College sports can do this even to people who never went to the college. When I lived in Ohio, my nanny was a massive Ohio State fan. She didn't go to Ohio State, but it didn't matter because she was from Ohio. Ohio State was Ohio walking onto a national stage wearing shoulder pads.

Michigan does this. Alabama does it. Nebraska does it. Tennessee does it. In certain parts of the country, the line between the university, the team and the place itself becomes wonderfully blurry. You don't need a diploma to wear the shirt. You just need to believe the shirt says something about you.

This doesn't work everywhere. New York has too many teams, too many schools and too many people arguing about which part of New York is actually New York. California is practically several countries forced to share a governor. But in Ohio, Ohio State can belong to the state. The potential tribe is no longer the alumni base. It's everybody.

And then there was Ray.

Ray left Michigan and went home to Long Island. He taught school, built his life in New York, and watched decades pass. Michigan came with him, and that's the part I can't stop thinking about.

I've spent months writing about sports organizations trying to build belonging. Access. Geography. Participation. Generational connections. Heroes. Stories. Rivalries. All the little threads that eventually make a person say “we” about a group of athletes they have never met.

College sports have nearly all of them and, almost by accident, may do them better than anyone. The funny part is that sports aren't even the university's main business. Michigan didn't need football to make Ray a Michigan man. Football simply gave Ray another place to express it. That may be the greatest advantage in sports, and it makes me wonder whether professional teams can ever get there.

I'm a Giants fan. God knows they've tested it. I've lived all over the world, often nowhere near New York and sometimes in places where following an NFL team required actual effort. When I lived in China, I would get up in the middle of the night or absurdly early on Monday morning just to follow the Giants on a game tracker. Not watch the game. Follow a tiny football moving across a computer screen and wait for the page to tell me whether my week was about to be ruined.

There was no rational reason to do this. I could have slept. I could have watched highlights later. I could have adopted whatever team happened to be nearby. The Raiders. The 49ers. Now the Panthers. Pick one. There was always another team, usually a more convenient team and, God knows, often a better team. I never considered it.

The Giants came with me. Los Angeles. China. Ohio. North Carolina. Geography changed, jobs changed, and most of my life changed around them, but the Giants stayed. Maybe that's the goal. Not loyalty, which sounds like something you measure in a survey, but identity.

Ray was a Michigan man. I am a Giants fan. Sometimes, if I'm being truthful, I think the relationship goes deeper than that. New York is still part of how I see myself, and the Giants are tangled up in New York, my childhood, my family, and a thousand Sundays I can no longer separate from one another. The Giants are in there somewhere.

College sports starts with that kind of advantage. The university gives people a place, a history, a community and an identity. Sports takes all of it and puts a scoreboard on the wall.

Now college sports is becoming a very big business. NIL, transfer portals, conference realignment, television contracts and private equity sniffing around the edges have made nearly every conversation about how much more money can be pulled from the machine. Maybe a lot. But I hope someone remembers what made the machine valuable in the first place.

Michigan got a kid from Long Island to spend the rest of his life calling himself a Michigan man. The football team benefited from that relationship, but it didn't create it. That's the tribal advantage. Sports has spent billions buying audiences. The real economic advantage belongs to the organizations that build tribes.