AbstractsCommunication

Abstract of Thesis Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Mass Communication AGENDA-SETTING AND THE BCS: AGENDA-SETTING EFFECTS ON DESIRED COLLEGE FOOTBALL RANKING IN THE BOWL CHAMPIONSHIP SERIES POLL By Todd Lawhorne August 2009 Chair: Michael Mitrook Major: Mass Communication The tradition rich institution of college football remains the only major U.S. sport which does not determine its annual champion through the process of tournament play. To determine a National Champion, the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) was created in 1998 to ensure a year end match up between the No. 1 and No. 2 ranked teams in the nation through a complex ranking system made up of one-third computer tabulations and two-third human voter. But the BCS has been riddled with controversy since its inception and arguments as to which two teams should play in the National Title game is an annual dispute. Due to this controversy, college football coaches have turned to the practice of campaigning through the media as an attempt to sway BCS poll voters into ranking their team higher in the Harris Interactive poll and USA Today/Coaches poll, the two polls which make up the human voting percentage of the BCS ranking formula. The following study attempts to determine whether this campaigning behavior displayed by college football coaches is effective in obtaining a higher ranking in the BCS through the generation of increased and positive media coverage justified by the agenda-setting theory. Agenda-setting theory was applied to this study based on its premise which states that the salience of a topic can be transferred from the media to the public based on amount of media coverage the topic receives. It could be theorized that as these campaigns are covered in the media, the salience of the topics addressed in the campaign are transferred from the media to the voting publics of the BCS. In order to measure amount and valence of media coverage, as well as mentions of campaigning behavior, a content analysis was employed which examined news articles from The New York Times (NYT), USA Today, The Sporting News (TSN), and the Associated Press (AP). This coded news content data was compared to the final BCS poll, final Harris Interactive poll, and final USA Today/Coaches poll to determine whether increased and favorable media coverage was correlated with a higher BCS ranking. The study found a strong correlation in both the relationships between increased and favorable media coverage and higher BCS ranking, as well as increased campaigning behavior coverage and higher BCS ranking. Both college football coaches and college football sports information directors may find the results of this study useful in future attempts at using campaigning as a means of generating more and favorable media coverage for their teams. This increased media coverage could help in persuading human voters, through topic salience transfer effects of agenda-setting theory, in the hopes of…