The Professional Bull Riders Tour: Growth and Development of a Niche Sport
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Professional Bull Riders Tour: Growth and Development of a Niche Sport The Professional Bull Riders Tour (PBR) was formed in 1992, when 20 professional bull riders--previously members of the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association--each invested $1,000 to form their own incorporated bull riding association. Membership in the PBR now stands at over 1,200 bull riders from four countries (the United States, Canada, Australia, and Brazil) and three continents (North America, South America, and Australia). Before the advent of the PBR, bull riding was one component of the traditional rodeo (the other events were bareback riding, steer wrestling, roping, and barrel racing). Bull riding had long been considered the premier rodeo event. Specifically because of bull riding's fan appeal, the founders of the PBR bet their $1,000 that the sport could stand on its own as an independent entity outside the rodeo format. Each year more than 104 million viewers tune in to the PBR on NBC, Versus, FOX, and a host of other networks across the globe (Wheatley, 2006). More than 1.5 million fans annually attend the PBR's multitiered events, which include the marquee Built Ford Tough Series (presented by Wrangler), the U.S. Smokeless Tobacco Company Challenger Tour, the Enterprise Rent-A-Car Tour, and the Discovery Tour, which is designed specifically for entry-level competitors (Wheatley, 2006). In 2006, the 13-year-old PBR conducted events in over 70 cities, offering successful riders a total purse of over $6.2 million. To collect a check, a 150-lb rider must stay on a bull weighing as much as 2,000 lb for a time of 8 seconds. The PBR today is a $46 million business, revenue having grown 150% over the past 5 years. From 2003 to 2005, the tour's adult fan base soared 48%, to 18 million, far outpacing the growth of NASCAR or any other major sport, according to Scarborough Research (Gregory, 2006). PBR Demographics and Sponsors When the PBR's leadership looks to the future, what they see in terms of growth and sponsorship is, clearly, NASCAR. If you lay the NASCAR demos [demographics] over our demos, they're almost identical, said Randy Bernard, the tour's CEO. We look at everything they do. What NASCAR has done, most obviously, is to turn a sport perceived as having only regional appeal into the country's second-biggest sport on television, now just behind the NFL (Halpern, 2006). The Bud Light brand is one of the PBR's sponsors. typical Bud Light drinker is male, white, 25 to 34 years old, married, with a high school or college diploma, and earns $20,000-$70,000 annually in one of a wide variety of occupations. This demographic profile echoes that of the PBR fan. Official sponsors of the PBR in addition to Bud Light have included the following: B&W Trailer Hitches Big Texas Trailer BowTech Archery Branson Tractors Bud Light Cabela's Cripple Creek Daisy Dickies Enterprise Rent-A-Car Express Personnel Svcs Ford Trucks Frito-Lay Jack Daniels Johnsonville Brats Mandalay Bay Mossy Oak Oberto Beef Jerky Pennington Seed Priefert Rocky Outdoor Gear Stetson City of Las Vegas U.S. Army U.S. Smokeless Tobacco Wrangler Jeans Yamaha Well-paying sponsors are a necessity for many if not most rodeo competitors, but at least one competitor's spouse has noted that A cowboy's wife needs to be a cowboy's biggest sponsor (Galayda, 2007). Marketing the PBR A niche sport trying to go mainstream is how Josh Peter described professional bull riding in his book Fried Twinkies, Buckle Bunnies and Bull Riders: Year Inside the Professional Bull Riders Tour (2006). After splitting from the Professional Rodeo Cowboy Association, the Professional Bull Riders Tour set out to make bull riding the next must-watch sport. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".