Story by Cole del Charco
Every football fan remembers Doug Flutie, or at least the Hail Mary.
With six seconds left on the clock in a 1984 football game against the juggernaut University of Miami, Flutie took the snap as quarterback for Boston College.
Flutie bounded six strides back before being chased out of the pocket. He stepped right, then lunged into a throw. As he let go, the ball soared like the eagle on his jersey.
The ball sailed past one, two, three Miami defenders, then fell into the arms of a leaping wide receiver. Game over.
The nation was stunned. Some no-name, private Catholic college just took down “The U.”
But something most people couldn’t imagine when Flutie was hoisted up by his teammates was just how much this play would change his college.
Applications to Boston College rose 30 percent within two years.
Welcome to what was quickly called the Flutie Effect.
The Flutie Effect is real — universities with drastic improvements in visible sports get more applicants — except when it isn’t.
Here’s what the data say:
- It’s real when a school goes from mediocrity to consistent winning;
- It isn’t real when winning programs win because they always win;
- It isn’t real when a school only marginally improves their on-field performance.
When losers win a lot
At Boston College applications flew in from around the country. More applicants than ever, and 30 percent more two years after Flutie.
The game was televised nationally, which led to one thing for the college: free publicity.
“Athletic success has a significant impact on the quality and quantity of applicants to institutions of higher education in the United States,” wrote Harvard University researcher Doug Chung in his paper on the advertising effect of college athletics.
Chung concludes a school jumping from mediocre to great at football can raise applications by nearly 18 percent. Boston College was an outlier. But to achieve a similar increase to that 18 percent in applicants without a big sports improvement, he says, a university would have to lower its tuition by almost 4 percent.
When winners win
For teams that already win consistently, a championship can help, but not nearly as much.
Analysis of admissions data shows that the common effects of national championships in the two revenue sports in the NCAA, basketball and football, are, in fact, positive.
Take, for example, the newly minted dynasty of Clemson University football. They’ve had winning seasons for years that culminated in a championship last season. But the real change has come over the last decade — when the winning really started.
Robert Bennett, the senior associate director of admissions at Clemson University, said he thinks the Flutie Effect is real.
“The answer is probably yes, but is there a way to measure it? Not directly,” Bennett said. “And as far as does winning a national championship affect admissions, the answer is probably yes, but it’s hard to tell how much.”
Clemson is still waiting for the effect to be measured on the class of students currently applying the year after a national championship.
The university’s application rates have been on a steady rise with help of the school’s improving football team. It’s unlikely that admission rates will jump significantly after the championship since the application rate has already been helped by success on the football field.
“(To say) Our application pool has grown exponentially may be a little bit of a stretch, but it certainly has grown,” Bennett said. “Since 2005 [it] has more than doubled.”
When Clemson’s current football coach Dabo Swinney was hired, the hype around the Tiger’s program really picked up. It’s hard to attribute a specific rise in applications to the improvement of the program around Swinney, but Bennett thinks the effect might be the type of people who choose to enroll.
Once Clemson started winning on the football field, it started attracting more athletically-inclined students.
“I think the culture is more activity, and what I mean people are more physically active,” Bennett said. “I think more students come here because they like sports, but then they get involved in club sports or going out on the lake.”
As Bennett points out there are dozens of factors that could influence applications numbers. Beyond that, Clemson is a special case because its students are admitted directly into a major, not just the university, keeping application rates relatively stable.
The long-time winners
At UNC-Chapel Hill, a long-time successful basketball school, there’s less evidence of admission increases following stand-out seasons. The number of applications for admission have been on a steady upward trend for a while.
According to the office of admissions at UNC, from 2006 to 2016 there was an average increase of 6.72 percent in applicants to the university. But it didn’t all come at once.
Surprisingly, the rate of increase markedly slowed in some years after UNC made it to basketball’s Final Four. That happened in 2007, following the Final Four in 2006, and in 2010, after the national championship in 2009.
In 2015, UNC saw a decrease in the percent of applications. However, after the team made it to the Final Four in 2016, application rates increased more twice as much as normal, 13.7 percent.
This increase comes even with the fact that UNC has a consistently top-tier basketball program and is acknowledged as a strong academic school.
Stephen Farmer, the vice chancellor for admissions, said there isn’t a strong correlation in Final Four appearances and an increase in applications.
“We know students are drawn to Carolina for our stellar academics, commitment to student success and vibrant campus community, which includes our athletic programs,” Farmer said.
UNC-Chapel Hill and Clemson University are both public universities and are considered large. The Flutie Effect appears to have limited impact for those kinds of schools, especially ones considered academically elite.
The private school champs
Small private schools with a history of athletic success experience even fewer results from the Flutie Effect.
Take Duke University. The school has five basketball national championships, the fourth most of all colleges, and three more than the second most successful private school.
After Duke won a championship in 2015, application numbers didn’t rise. They actually fell from 32,513 to 31,186.
The results were a little different in 2010, after the team won a championship. Applicants rose from 2009 to 2010, but that was part of a consistent upswing in applicants, presumed to have been caused by the economic crisis.
So, while the actual influence of the Flutie Effect depends on the nature of the university, one result is certain — his Hail Mary pass against Miami won him the Heisman Trophy.
