What Actually Makes a College Fight Song “Hype”?

Every college fight song is meant to hype a crowd, but not every crowd gets hyped the same way. This project examines how tempo and lyrical intensity shape four distinct styles of hype.

Methodology

Fight songs generate “hype” through both musical energy and linguistic content. To capture these dimensions, we compare tempo (BPM) with a composite measure of lyrical aggression derived from each song’s lyrics.

Lyrical aggression combines the number of aggressive clichés in each song (trope_count) with the density of the word “fight” per 100 words (fight_density), normalized by word count so longer songs do not mechanically appear more aggressive.

lyrical_aggression = trope_count + α · fight_density (α = 1)

Median lines in the chart below divide songs into four stylistic categories for clear comparison.

Big Ten programs are highlighted for reference; the full dataset provides context for comparison.

Key Takeaways

Hype is multidimensional. Some songs rely on both fast tempo and aggressive language, while others generate energy through speed or language alone.
Aggressive language isn’t required for high tempo. Many songs are fast without heavy combat imagery, suggesting hype can be driven musically rather than lyrically.
Lyrical aggression and tempo can diverge. Some songs are linguistically intense but musically slower, reflecting distinct stylistic traditions across programs.

Hype Beyond the Song

Fight songs shape how hype is expressed, but they also operate within broader social contexts. To examine how the four hype styles identified above appear across different competitive and psychological stadium contexts, we combined recent home win rates (2021–2025) and stadium capacity into a standardized measure of stadium difficulty. The distribution below shows how Big Ten schools (n = 18 programs) within each hype style are spread across low-, medium-, and high-difficulty home environments.

Key Takeaway

Fight song hype styles align differently with home-field environments. Big Ten programs with more lyrically aggressive fight songs appear more frequently in medium- to high-difficulty stadiums, while programs whose songs rely primarily on faster tempo tend to be concentrated in easier home environments.

How the analysis works

Fight song data: processed primary project dataset
Fight song dataset description: FiveThirtyEight fight songs dataset (tempo and lyrical tropes)
Big Ten subset and derived measures: processed secondary project dataset
Hype styles defined by dataset medians (BPM=140, lyrical aggression=7.409638554)
Stadium difficulty score: standardized home win rate (2021–2025) plus standardized stadium capacity; schools are grouped into low, medium, and high tiers using terciles of this score.
Secondary analysis focuses on Big Ten programs