What College Football Reveals About Online Polarization

Based on research by Anastasiya Zavyalova (Rice Business), Conor Callahan (University of Illinois Chicago), Timothy D. Hubbard (Dublin City University), and J. Daniel Zyung (Southern Methodist University)

Key takeaways:

• Competitions can intensify online polarization by activating how people identify with, or against, an organization.
• Supporters are more likely to engage online after their teams’ victories than losses, while opponents are more likely to engage online after a rival’s loss than victory.
• Polarized constituents do not evaluate organizational performance objectively; instead their reactions are identity-based.
   

There’s a familiar pattern to how people react after their favorite team loses a big game, or after their most hated rival wins. They close the laptop. They switch the phone to “do not disturb.” They mute the group chat. In the immediate aftermath, the outcome is too painful to argue about online. The internet, for now, can wait. 

There’s an inverse pattern after a favorite team wins, or a hated rival loses. People log on right away. They post in the comments. They celebrate the winner, put down the loser or do some messy combination of both. For this group, the night is just getting started.

Whichever side of the competition these groups identify with, their behavior follows a pattern that new research helps explain. A 2025 study in the Journal of Management co-authored by Anastasiya Zavyalova of Rice Business finds that competitive outcomes can sharpen the line between “us” and “them,” pushing supporters and opponents toward different, but predictable, forms of online engagement. 

To study that dynamic, Zavyalova and her colleagues looked for an environment where rivalries run deep, identities are public, and winners and losers are declared on a regular schedule. They found it in NCAA Division I college football. 

The psychology behind who posts and who doesn’t

“The stakes of understanding online polarization are genuinely high,” says Zavyalova, an associate professor of strategic management. “Brands, universities, political parties, sports franchises — any organization with a public presence — are navigating an increasingly polarized audience.”

Whether it’s Texas/Oklahoma or Apple/Android, it’s easy to understand why fans engage with teams and organizations they love. Harder to explain is why those same people may spend just as much energy engaging with rivals they can’t stand. 

Researchers call the first relationship “identification” — what it looks like for an Astros fan to cheer when the team wins. The second they call “disidentification” — what it looks like for someone who hates the Astros to cheer when they lose.

“An increase in comments can come from very different places. If you only look at the volume, you can misread what the audience is actually telling you.”

These attachments shape when and how someone shows up in comment sections and on social media. People engage when the outcome gives them a feeling they want to extend: pride in a team’s victory or satisfaction in a rival’s defeat. But when a competitive outcome threatens an identity they want to protect, screens tend to go dark. 

This second instinct is the surprising one. “The surprising part is that anger doesn’t drive online behavior in the way we assume,” Zavyalova says. “While a painful loss may send some people online to vent, more often, it does the opposite. The impulse isn’t to fight. It’s to disappear.”

What 401 football games revealed

The 2013-14 college football season gave Zavyalova and her colleagues an unusual research opportunity. For the first time, ESPN.com required commenters to link their ESPN accounts to their Facebook profiles, making it possible to see which teams commenters publicly supported. The researchers also actively looked for users who displayed opposition on their Facebook pages or joined specific anti-team Facebook groups, such as “Not being a Buckeye.”

Using that data, the researchers tracked online comments across games involving teams in the nation’s top 25 college football rivalries. Then they asked a simple question: When the final whistle blew, who rushed to comment, and who went silent? 

The pattern was clear. People were more likely to engage online when the outcome affirmed their identity. For fans, that meant a victory. After a team won, its supporters were nearly 9% more likely to comment online than they were after a loss. 

For opponents, the pattern ran in the opposite direction. A rival’s loss created its own form of affirmation. Opponents were nearly 7% more likely to comment after a team they opposed lost than after the same team won. 

The details of a game mattered, too, but mostly for fans. Unexpected outcomes made supporters more likely to post, especially after unexpected victories. Close games produced a similar pattern. For opponents, the basic meaning of the result mattered more: did the rival lose, or not?

What online engagement can hide

Although the study focuses on college football, its implications extend to any organization with visible supporters, critics and rivals. In polarized environments, people do not always respond as neutral observers. They respond through identity: what an event says about the organization they support, the rival they oppose and, by extension, themselves.

Consider how these identities clash in the corporate arena. When Ford edged out Tesla for a major Electric Vehicle of the Year award in 2021, or when Blue Origin and SpaceX raced to build a lunar lander, the resulting spikes in online engagement were not purely objective evaluations of the companies’ technological feats. Instead, they were driven by polarized constituents reacting to competitive outcomes. 

Some brands actively leverage this dynamic. The researchers cite a former chief marketing officer of Wendy’s, who observed that whenever the fast-food chain “directly called out” competitors online, constituent involvement soared and people engaged “like crazy.” This doesn’t necessarily mean everyone who engaged was a big fan a Wendy’s — maybe they just enjoyed seeing a brand they dislike be humbled online. 

“Managers need to be careful about treating online engagement as a simple measure of support,” Zavyalova says. “An increase in comments can come from very different places. If you only look at the volume, you can misread what the audience is actually telling you.”

For today’s executives, the lesson is clear: high-stakes corporate competitions evoke identity-affirming reactions that closely mirror the polarized divides of a college football rivalry.

Written by Scott Pett

“Competition and Constituents’ Polarization Online,” Journal of Management (2025).