[jayasena]

But to answer your question anyway, I've always been given the impression that grad students are less engaged in general. Remember that your anecdotes don't really mean anything; of course some go, but obviously most don't, if they did they'd be the majority of the students section. I think that the brobdingnagian disparity in nationality (33% vs 7% foreign-born) matters a lot when you're talking about a sport with tiny international appeal, and is responsible for a large part of the general impression.

I don't disagree that most grad students probably don't get as engaged as undergrads but the foreign nationality thing isn't an insurmountable barrier. I arrived in the US when I started undergrad at USC and was a season ticket holder by my sophomore year. And we had a big group who attended every home game together, a majority of whom were international students. Most of us could no longer conveniently follow our home teams (time zone differences, limited TV coverage etc.) and football filled that void. We had Mexicans, Indians, Italians, Sri Lankans, Germans, Brazilians, Pakistanis and folks from a few other countries in that group. My point is that given the right level of interest and engagement from the larger university community, a good fraction of the international students could be "assimilated" quite easily. USC had an environment that was conducive to that. And interest in Stanford football is probably as high as it's been in recent times. Hopefully that's helping engage more of the international students.

And to Garvin's point, I'm now a much bigger Stanford fan than I am an SC fan (and have been for quite a while, starting from well before the recent resurgence in the program). I may well be in the minority in that sense but "dual fan" grad students aren't that rare. We had people in our research group with undergrad degrees from places like Michigan and Washington who were still die-hard fans of those schools but also attended Stanford games regularly.

I think the bigger factor is whether you are a sports fan at all or not. Anecdotally, to me, Stanford seemed to have a significant fraction of the student body who just didn't care about sports at all.

[jayasena]

But to answer your question anyway, I've always been given the impression that grad students are less engaged in general. Remember that your anecdotes don't really mean anything; of course some go, but obviously most don't, if they did they'd be the majority of the students section. I think that the brobdingnagian disparity in nationality (33% vs 7% foreign-born) matters a lot when you're talking about a sport with tiny international appeal, and is responsible for a large part of the general impression.

I don't disagree that most grad students probably don't get as engaged as undergrads but the foreign nationality thing isn't an insurmountable barrier. I arrived in the US when I started undergrad at USC and was a season ticket holder by my sophomore year. And we had a big group who attended every home game together, a majority of whom were international students. Most of us could no longer conveniently follow our home teams (time zone differences, limited TV coverage etc.) and football filled that void. We had Mexicans, Indians, Italians, Sri Lankans, Germans, Brazilians, Pakistanis and folks from a few other countries in that group. My point is that given the right level of interest and engagement from the larger university community, a good fraction of the international students could be "assimilated" quite easily. USC had an environment that was conducive to that. And interest in Stanford football is probably as high as it's been in recent times. Hopefully that's helping engage more of the international students.

And to Garvin's point, I'm now a much bigger Stanford fan than I am an SC fan (and have been for quite a while, starting from well before the recent resurgence in the program). I may well be in the minority in that sense but "dual fan" grad students aren't that rare. We had people in our research group with undergrad degrees from places like Michigan and Washington who were still die-hard fans of those schools but also attended Stanford games regularly.

I think the bigger factor is whether you are a sports fan at all or not. Anecdotally, to me, Stanford seemed to have a significant fraction of the student body who just didn't care about sports at all.