College fans chase the player for a week. They stay with the school for good.

On April 20, 2025, Nico Iamaleava committed to UCLA. Two weeks earlier he’d been Tennessee’s starting quarterback. Over the next three days, people looked him up almost nine times as often as they looked up UCLA football.

One player. One of the most famous programs in college football. Nine to one.

That gap is the new college sports in one number. Players can move every year. Schools now pay them directly, about $1.77 billion in the first year of revenue sharing alone. And a common worry, among fans and the people running the sport, is that loyalty is gone. That fans will follow the stars and forget the schools.

So we went looking for it. We tracked attention to 174 of the biggest transfers in football and basketball since 2021, to the schools they left and the schools they picked, and to every FBS program through six seasons of games. The answer surprised us. College fans chase the player for a week. They stay with the school for good.

The week belongs to the player

When a star transfer commits, the attention lands on him, not his new school. In the three days after a commitment, the typical player drew almost seven times his usual attention. The school he picked drew about 10% more than other programs that same week.

Add it all up and 91% of the extra attention went to the player. The school got 9%.

In almost three out of four commitments, the player out-drew his entire new program. Carson Beck, the day he picked Miami, drew roughly ten times what Miami football did over the same three days. In women’s basketball it was all of them. In every one of the 18 commitments we could measure, Hailey Van Lith’s among them, the player drew more than the program she was joining.

That’s the part everyone already suspects. Here’s the part they don’t.

The season belongs to the school

We looked at what happened to each school the season after a star left. Relative to every other program, the school he walked away from kept about 95% of its attention. That’s well inside the normal swing from one year to the next. Losing a star doesn’t cost a program its fans. If it costs anything at all, it’s small enough to get lost in an ordinary year.

Winning doesn’t buy much either. Across six seasons of FBS football, going from a .500 record to .750, about three more wins, lifted a program’s attention by about 10%. A loss cost about 7% of the following week’s attention compared with a win. An upset loss cost about 10%.

College fan bases are remarkably fixed. They don’t grow much when the team is good, and they don’t shrink much when it isn’t. Which explains the top of the attention table.

The biggest fan bases barely depend on the record

Alabama draws about five and a half times the attention of a typical FBS program. That’s not a surprise. Most of the top 15 are the programs you’d guess, and most of them win a lot.

Look at number 14. Nebraska won 42% of its games over these six seasons and still drew almost three times the typical program. It’s the only school in the top 15 with a losing record, and it sits just above USC. Florida and Florida State, both barely over .500 across the stretch, rank eighth and 13th.

Those fan bases were built over generations. A bad stretch dents them. It doesn’t move them.

The offseason isn’t the new season

One more thing we expected to find, and didn’t. With portal windows, signing days and a coaching carousel that never stops, it feels like college football runs all year now. The attention says otherwise.

Offseason attention, February through July, came in at about 26% of the season before for the typical program in 2026. That’s the lowest in our data. The headlines run all year. The fans still mostly show up in the fall.

What it means

For the schools, it’s a useful reminder of what the money is buying. Revenue sharing buys players, and players win games. It doesn’t buy fans. The fan base is the one thing a program already owns, and it’s the thing least affected by who’s on the roster this year.

For the players, it explains why their own attention is worth so much. The spike belongs to them. When a star moves, the audience moves to him for a week, and that’s exactly when a name-and-likeness deal is worth the most.

And for brands, it suggests a simple split. Sponsor the player for the moment. Sponsor the school for the season.

The worry was that college sports would turn into free agency and the fans would follow the money. So far, they haven’t. They watch the star walk out the door, look him up at his new school, and go right back to rooting for the laundry.

How we measured. Attention is the number of people actively looking up each player and program online each day. The transfer set covers 174 of the most prominent football and basketball transfers that took effect from 2021 to 2026, with portal and commitment dates checked against news reports. Commitment-week figures compare the three days after a commitment with the player’s and school’s usual levels over the previous four weeks, and adjust the school’s figure for what other programs drew those same days. The school-retention figure compares each school’s in-season attention the year after a star left with the year before, relative to every program in its sport. The winning and losing figures cover all FBS programs for the 2019 and 2021–2025 seasons (2020 excluded), using every regular-season and bowl game. Season attention runs September 1 to November 15. Because the transfer list leans toward famous moves, we don’t report how much new schools or players gained over a full season; those numbers are inflated by the players who went on to star.