College fight songs are meant to be shouted, clapped, and repeated by thousands of fans. This project explores tempo, duration, and lyrical tropes that make songs easy to chant.
The distribution for the duration of fight songs has a bimodal appearance, with most songs clustered around centers of approximately 75 BPM and 150 BPM. BPM does not appear to have a strong correlation with duration: songs with a higher BPM (i.e. a quicker tempo) still largely fall into the common range of a duration between approximately 20 seconds and 120 seconds. Texas A&M, with a song duration of 172 seconds, is a noticeable outlier. They do say that everything is bigger in Texas!
The Big Ten has the highest median song duration and the widest overall spread. The ACC and Pac-12 fall in the middle, with moderate medians and some outliers. The Big 12 and SEC tend to have shorter median durations, though the SEC includes a notable long-duration outlier that increases its overall range. The Independent category does not have enough data to be fully comparable. A substantial amount of overlap between these boxes means that we cannot claim that one conference has meaningfully longer songs than others, but the trends do suggest that the Big Ten tends towards longer songs, and the Big 12 and SEC towards shorter ones.
In the chord chart, “win/won,” “victory,” and “fight” have the largest arcs, indicating they are the most common concepts overall. They also have the thickest connections between each other, showing that songs emphasizing winning, quite naturally, emphasize fighting and victory. “spelling” has a noticeable presence and strong links to “win/won” and “fight,” suggesting that spelling out team names is frequently paired with competitive language rather than standing alone. “colors” and “rah” appear moderately often and connect broadly, acting as supportive elements instead of as a central message.
Chants work best near marching tempo, where crowds stay in sync.
Spelling, repeated words, and nonsense syllables are easy (and fun!) to say.
Shorter songs loop more naturally during games.
References to fighting, winning, and opponents ramp up the energy.