Chapel Hill Review

Dr. Marc Benevides is a Tar Heels fan to the core.

He attended the University of North Carolina as an undergraduate and also for medical school. He did his residency in Chapel Hill as well. He currently practices medicine in Cary, outside Raleigh.

He loved to attend Tar Heel football games even as a hard-working, busy resident.

“You could look out of the back window of the hospital and you are staring at the football stadium,” he told the Chapel Hill Review. “You could see the field almost.”

He attends games in-person whenever he can or he watches on television or on a sport app on his phone. He loves the game-day experience, even if that is on an app. If UNC provides such an app, “I don’t know about it,” the physician said.

He lives only about 45 minutes away from campus and tries to attend as many games as possible.

But although football tickets can be relatively easy to purchase at UNC, basketball tickets are not, Benevides noted. Rarely does UNC basketball have a losing season and the Tar Heels frequently reach the NCAA Final Four.

“For basketball, it’s impossible,” Benevides said. “For football it depends on how good [the Tar Heels] are. If they’re good you can get [tickets] but you are going to pay a lot for them. We play Duke every other year [at home] and you can just walk into their stadium. They don’t even charge half the time because no one goes to their football games.”

For basketball games in particular that he could not attend, Benevides definitely would consider using a virtual same-day experience app. For example, the app might include virtual tailgating, Jumbotron views, highlight reels, photo sharing and even smack talking.

“That would be very entertaining,” Benevides said.

It could also be very informative.

A Louisiana State University graduate student, Theodore Charles Greener, found in his research for a master’s thesis that fans who consume sports media are more knowledgeable than those who simply watch the games.

“Individuals considered high consumers of sports media scored significantly higher on the knowledge measure than low consumers,” Greener's research found. “The difference was nearly double, as high consumers scored roughly 50% better than low consumers did. Thus, sports fans do not only consume sports media, but they gain knowledge through explicit attention to both games and non-game content.”