Supporting the teams of a university is one way of extending the self and
communicating it to others. There is a greater opportunity to enhance
self-esteem via identification if the university community is perceived as
prestigious. The individual fan can receive the benefit of status derived from
community prestige indirectly by identifying with a team. The perceived
prestige and status of a sponsored event has also been shown to be associated
with consumer intentions to attend to, and respond favorably toward
sponsoring firms (Speed and Thompson, 2000).