At halftime, with players locked in a surprising tie with the top-ranked men’s basketball team in the country, the Twitter feed of the University of Maryland-Baltimore County’s athletic department seized the spotlight to make a sales pitch.
It seemed at the time that UMBC was making use of a window that was about to close. But you’ve almost certainly heard what happened next: The Retrievers went on to make history. In the second half, UMBC outscored the University of Virginia by 20 points, becoming the first men’s team with a 16-seed to beat a one-seeded squad. Meanwhile the man behind the punch-drunk UMBC Athletics Twitter account became a star.
“I turned to someone at halftime and said, ‘No matter what happens, people are going to pay attention to us,’” Zach Seidel, the man behind the account, said in an interview with Slam magazine, one of many he conducted after the game. When UMBC took a quick lead at the start of second half, he said, “I was like, ‘Alright, people are paying attention. Let’s do some funny tweets, let’s try and get the school attention. We’re going to have some time in the limelight so let’s put a positive spin on this for the school.”
Now UMBC has a bit more time to talk itself up to the nation. It’s already well known in many higher-education circles. Freeman A. Hrabowski III, a mathematician who has been its president since 1992, has helped guide it from a largely unknown commuter campus into a public research university with nearly 14,000 students. The university has been widely praised for its science and engineering programs and its work to increase diversity in those fields. (It has also drawn attention for its stellar chess team, which until Friday had earned the institution its most famous victories.)
Hrabowski told The Baltimore Sun on Saturday that he was thrilled by the attention his university was getting because of the win, especially for its record off the court.
“People began to Google us and to see the academic achievements,” he told the Sun. “It is by far the greatest source of visibility we have had in the history of the university.”
The Underdog Effect
But how much can a basketball tournament raise a university’s profile? Can an upset win, for example, really be an admissions boon? There’s evidence that it can. In 2006, George Mason University, an unheralded 11-seed, became a tournament darling with a shocking Final Four run. In March 2008, The Chronicle’s Brad Wolverton reported that the university had seen a 22-percent rise in freshman applications — with a 40-percent jump among out-of-staters — and a 350-percent rise in admissions inquiries.
In 2010, it was Butler University’s turn. The university’s near-miss in the national championship game earned it a wave of free publicity. At first, Tom Weede, the university’s vice president for enrollment, told The Chronicle’s Libby Sander that he wasn’t expecting an increase in yield. Accepted students “don’t just enroll because we have a good basketball team,” he said.
Two months later, though, Weede admitted that he’d underestimated the impact of Butler’s run. The university’s incoming freshman class had swelled to 1,107 students, up from 974 on the same day the previous year.
A Bloomberg analysis last year of other Cinderella stories offered more data to indicate short-term gains, at least, for the tournament’s underdog winners. Colleges that upset teams seeded at least 10 spots ahead of their own rank experienced a median student-application increase of 7 percent in the following fall, compared with the previous year, according to Bloomberg, which examined five years of tournament results.
The attention can help colleges in other ways, too, Bloomberg noted, including in donations and sales. For example, Florida Gulf Coast University, a 15-seed that made it to the Sweet 16 in 2013, saw sales of university apparel increase by more than 2,000 percent that year and royalties from licensed sales nearly quadruple.
At UMBC, there’s already one clear beneficiary: the UMBC Athletics Twitter feed. Before tipoff against Virginia, it had fewer than 6,000 followers. Now it’s well above 95,000 and rising.
Sara Hebel is assistant managing editor at The Chronicle. She directs a team of editors and reporters who cover broad trends in higher education and the people who grapple with them. Follow her on Twitter @shebel, or email her at sara.hebel@chronicle.com
Brock Read is an assistant managing editor at The Chronicle. He directs a team of editors and reporters who cover policy, research, labor, and academic trends, among other things. Follow him on Twitter @bhread, or drop him a line at brock.read@chronicle.com.
