Why does the underdog win

Another contributing factor that underdogs in these games are winning more than losing is the players themselves.

Bragging rights of taking down a top school on the national stage often fuels the fires of victory. Because of all this, players kick it up an extra notch and lay it all on the line. In college football, there is no undervaluing the fight of those athletes, making them and their undervalued teams very profitable for a handicapper's bankroll. So, when the perfect scenario arises on a Thursday night, a handicapper needs to pay special attention to the subplots.

Taking a favorite to cover the points on a big stage has proved to be detrimental to bankrolls so far this year. Other betting pros, such as Bill Davis from Big Time Sharps, understand that there are numerous statistics to put into an algorithm to help factor in who will win a Thursday night game.

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Psychologists consistently find that people get more joy out of unexpected successes than expected ones, and similarly experience more pain from unexpected failures than ones we anticipate. Some researchers point out that this could provide a good reason to root for the underdog: you have less to lose if your team loses, and a lot more to gain if it pulls off an upset.

No one has specifically studied this idea as it relates to rooting for underdogs, though, and it's hard to say whether it really applies. This sort of thinking is a very calculated, rational way to approach a game — and there's something emotional and uncontrolled about many people's love for the upset. It's easy to root for the underdog and the upset when there's little at stake — but when we have something real to lose, researchers find, our support tapers off.

Scott Allison of the University of Richmond came to this conclusion in a study on people's support for all sorts of underdogs, whether in sports, business, or art. In one part of the study, participants read a scenario in which two companies competed for a contract to to test the water in Boise, Idaho. One was a new, struggling, small company, the other a well-established, decades-old one. When asked, slightly more than half of participants said they'd root for the small one to land the contract.

But when the scenario was changed so that participants were told the companies would be testing water for potential cancer-causing chemicals in their own hometowns, the results were the opposite: more than twice as many rooted for the established, reliable company to win the bid.

The conclusion Allison draws is that when we have something bigger on the line — in this case, health — our support for the underdog evaporates. Similarly, he writes, we might root for a mom-and-pop store when Walmart moves in to the neighborhood, but ultimately we make big purchases wherever it's cheaper. In sports, this is expressed in the fact that most of us root for upsets — unless they come at the expense of our own team. Ultimately, our team winning is the priority, and upsets are a thrilling, secondary interest.

As Allison puts it, "Although rooting for the underdog is pervasive, the effect is a mile wide and an inch deep. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower through understanding. Financial contributions from our readers are a critical part of supporting our resource-intensive work and help us keep our journalism free for all.

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