Ute fans coming out of woodwork

Psychologists, who have yet to find a behavior they couldn't label, have a name for the kind of University of Utah football fans who are suddenly buying Ute hats and towels and bumper stickers now that the team is 10 and 0. We're talking about the fans who, in leaner years, didn't even own a red sweatshirt.

BIRG, the phenomenon is called. That stands for "basking in reflected glory." Not that we all don't bask a little, but apparently many BIRGers bask excessively and tend to be fair-weather fans.

"It's amazing how many long-term faithful fans have emerged, if you know what I mean," observes Brigham Young University psychology professor Darhl M. Pedersen about all the new fans to the north.

"The real test of a fan is that they're there through thick and thin," adds Pedersen, whose own school is going through a period that is tending toward thinness.

Psychologists like to study fans because fandom is a perfect example of "social identity theory," says Christian End, who teaches and researches fan psychology at Xavier University in Ohio. Being a fan, he says, reveals to what extent being a part of a group affects our self-concept.

Some people — the BIRGers — think other people will think they're cool because they belong to a winning team. "Even if it's an illusion that others are perceiving them in a more positive light, just having that belief results in them feeling better about themselves," he says. (End has news for them, though. He once did a study and found that the fans of winning teams aren't perceived any differently from those whose teams lose. On the other hand, fans who are disloyal are considered scum.)

People who have a strong sense of personal, family or spiritual identity, says BYU's Pedersen, are less likely to BIRG. They're also less like to CORF ("cut off reflected failure"). The CORFers are the ones who write letters to their school's athletic department when the team loses, he says. They might even boo their own team when things don't go their way. At the very least they'll distance themselves from their losing team by saying "they lost," not "we lost."

Real fans "know it would be foolish to pray to God to help their team win," Pedersen says. "They can see past the winning and losing." Well-adjusted fans, he says, don't get depressed if their team loses.

Nor do they cope by distancing themselves from their losing team, says Xavier's End. "They blame the officials. . . . Fans can come up with tons of things to blame an outcome on: the weather, the sun, the playing surface."