On any list of the most memorable plays in college football — or sports in general — Doug Flutie’s "Hail Mary" pass to Gerard Phelan is sure to be near the top.

The magical last-second heave by the 5-foot-9 Flutie into the night air at the Orange Bowl to give Boston College a 47-45 win over defending national champion University of Miami (Florida) has been replayed countless times.

The date was November 23, 1984 — the day after Thanksgiving — and it’s one of those moments that prompt people to remember where they were and what they were doing when it happened. It certainly is no surprise that the play was named one of the Top 25 Defining Moments in the 100-year history of the NCAA.

While the play perhaps was the crowning achievement in Flutie’s all-America career at Boston College, the fallout of that play — and the effect of Flutie’s career at the institution — sparked theories and discussion about the impact of sudden athletics success on a school’s fiscal well-being, the number and quality of admissions and the amount of donations. Researchers commonly refer to the dynamic in fact as "the Flutie effect."

When Flutie arrived at Boston College in the fall of 1981 from Natick (Massachusetts) High School courtesy of the last football scholarship available, few could imagine the impact he would have on the institution. He became the starting quarterback during his freshman year, then guided the Eagles to three straight bowl games, an unprecedented achievement for the Boston College football program.

The school administration already had plans in place to transform Boston College into a more national destination for students interested in undergraduate studies, but the quarterback’s popularity accelerated the implementation timeline.

"Just as we were increasing faculty, financial aid and all of the components necessary for that kind of growth, we had this tremendous visibility with Doug Flutie," said Reid Oslin, who was the football sports information director at Boston College during Flutie’s college career. "We had dozens of nationally televised games. We experienced an increase in applications. Souvenir sales, which had not been strong at that point, skyrocketed. We were not licensed at that time. We always thought it was good enough that someone was wearing a Boston College shirt out there."

Eight days after leading Boston College to the thrilling win over Miami, Flutie was awarded the Heisman Trophy. The next day’s edition of the Boston Globe was the highest-selling newspaper for that publication at the time.

That kind of exposure sparked an increase in donations by BC alumni and prompted campus presidents and athletics directors around the country to ponder the power of having successful sports programs.

"All of the sudden the big gift at Christmas that year was a No. 22 Boston College jersey," said Oslin, who currently is the senior media relations officer for public affairs at Boston College. "It put us in a major bowl for the first time in many years at Boston College. We went to the Cotton Bowl that year. It was a $1 million bowl, which was huge at the time."

The Flutie effect emerged recently in a study the NCAA commissioned to examine spending trends in intercollegiate athletics. Jonathan Orszag, the senior managing director of the consultant group Competition Policy Associates, was among researchers who studied whether investing heavily into athletics translated into economic growth for the institution. The study, conducted over an eight-year period, found — on average — little, if any, correlation. It was an important finding that positioned data to refute the common myth of an athletics "arms race" — that spending more surely meant more wins on the field and more profits off the field. The study, even when it was updated to include data on capital expenditures, found that for the majority of Division I schools, a dollar spent doesn’t produce much more than a dollar earned.

But there are outliers in the data.

Boston College is one of those examples that reflect a perfect storm of elements and timing. Flutie’s charismatic play on the field and his being considered an underdog because of his diminutive size combined with the institution’s national plan to produce a special situation.

"Part of the benefit in that particular situation is that you have a strong underlying university to start with," Orszag said. "The academic environment that the team operated under was important. I also believe if the success is surprising to folks, it is helpful as well. I would add this caveat, however: It is very difficult to predict. If this was some secret sauce, everyone would be using it."

A more recent outlier is George Mason University, whose men’s basketball team made an improbable run to the Final Four in 2006. Head coach Jim Larranaga has witnessed firsthand the George Mason version of the Flutie effect on his campus.

Normally, the George Mason student bookstore does around $45,000 in sales for a month. Last March, in a 10-day period during which the Patriots defeated the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and No. 1-seed University of Connecticut in the NCAA tournament, the bookstore sold $876,000 worth of merchandise, including 32,000 T-shirts.

Larranaga said that typically, about 20 percent of prospective students end up attending the university, but this year, 60 percent of those students accepted.

"We had a celebration at George Mason two weeks after the Final Four," Larranaga said during a question-and-answer session at the National Alliance of Two-Year College Athletic Administrators on June 20 in New Orleans. "We raised $400,000 in 20 minutes. It has been unbelievable. The Wall Street Journal did a survey to determine how much the publicity meant to the university, and they estimated we would have had to have spent about $100 million to get the kind of exposure we got for going to the Final Four."

Larranaga has also seen doors open in recruiting. His three signees this spring include a junior college all-American, an honorable-mention junior college all-American and the high school player of the year in Baltimore.

While sudden success sometimes leads to sudden growth, sustaining that growth is what keeps the moment from becoming just that — a moment in time or an outlier in a data set. That’s why the Orszag study emphasized the term "on average." In other words, a basketball or football championship will prompt more of an economic spike at an institution unaccustomed to such lofty levels than it will at a traditional power.

But some schools have made that first impression last. Gonzaga University is a good example.

The Bulldogs became nationally prominent during the 1999 NCAA men’s basketball tournament by reaching the regional finals. Over the last seven years, the program has maintained that success.