The Geography of College Football Fans

NUance

NUance

Assistant Coach
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The Geography of College Football Fans (and Realignment Chaos)by Nate Silver, The Quad, The NY Times College Football Blog, September 19, 2011, 2:24 PM

<snip>

The most popular team in New York, for instance, is Rutgers. They have about 600,000 fans in New York City. That isn’t bad, but it represents only about 20 percent of college football fans in New York (in addition to some competing teams like Syracuse, many New Yorkers are transplants and bring their football loyalties with them). It also represents only about 3 percent of New York’s overall population.

The contrast might be something like Omaha, Neb. It’s a much smaller market — but it’s far more football-avid than New York, according to the Google data. And it is dominated by one team, Nebraska, which has in excess of a 70 percent market share. Thus, Nebraska has about two-thirds as many football fans in Omaha as Rutgers does in New York, even though the market is about 18 times smaller.

<snip>

Big Ten

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LINK
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http://thequad.blogs...lignment-chaos/

An excellent NY Times article from a few months back. I couldn't find where this was posted on HB before. (Did I already post this?) So here it is.

 
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a very interesting read but I received an error message when I tried to read the map Although I know this article focuses on realignment numbers, I would be interested in knowing how popular college football is in NFL markets and how much CFB interest ebbs and flows for teams that do well in any given year. I guess I want to figure out a fairweather fan factor. Another interesting stat would be to see how much each team's fans spend and what they spend it on (apparel, tv pay per view, tickets, travel).

But go B10

 
If I remember right they had a lot of issues with the methodology of this article. Like any online survey theres going to be a lot of self selection going on which skews the numbers. I refuse to believe that Iowa has more fans than Nebraska, Tech more than UGA or Clemson more than South Carolina because of differences in National success and Student Body sizes

I think the problem is self selection screwing up the sample, then they took patterns from the sample and extrapolated them in applying them to markets close to the schools which isn't the right way to do it. Anyhow it makes for a fun thought experiment...not much else.

 
Bucky, what you are saying pretty much goes to KRC1995's line of thoughts above about fairweather fans. There are fans, and then there are FANS. Lowercase fans know that their team went 9-4 last year, and that Rex Burkhead is the RB and Taylor Martinez is the QB. FANS were unsatisfied with the 9-4 because of the blowout losses to Wiscy and Meechicken, the faux pas that was the Northwestern game, and can probably name most of the two-deep. And the two deep for the upcoming year too. The Huskers have a lot of fans. And an inordinate number of FANS as well.

 
There may be something to the fairweather fan bit but keep in mind that happens to every team. Each school has "Fans" as well as "fans" and I have no reason to believe that UNL has any more or any fewer than a comparable program. That's not to play down what you're saying though because I think it may be partly true.

"After having collected more than 30,000 responses over the past several years, this has allowed the CommonCensus folks to divide the country up between the different college teams into what looks like a Jackson Pollock painting."

So since this article is almost a year old we'll look at three seasons: 2010, 2009 and 2008.

Nebraska

2010- 10-4, Big 12 North Champs, lost bowl

2009- 10-4, Big 12 North Champs, won bowl

2008- 9-4, won bowl

Iowa

2010- 8-5, won bowl

2009- 11-2, won BCS bowl

2008- 9-4, won bowl

So there Iowa had a slightly better overall run of it winning 71% of their games and a BCS Bowl. Nebraska played solid football but those seasons may not have been enough to stir up fans who are conditioned to expect better. For Iowa those are great years so maybe they had more fair weather fans... :dunno

 
Yeah, they only polled selected people in major markets. In other words, this is horribly skewed against the state of Nebraska.

Who cares anyway, we know who we are.

 
tschu said:
Yeah, they only polled selected people in major markets. In other words, this is horribly skewed against the state of Nebraska.
Who cares anyway, we know who we are.
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I don't know that they necessrily polled people in major markets...I mean it was an online survey but they certainly did put a lot of weight into them in their write up which is too bad.

NYC is not a college football town. Sorry. They tried to put it into perspective but still...

 
Ohio State and Nebraska have roughly the same amount of fans based on student enrollment. OSU is roughly 2.5 times bigger then UNL

 
Bucky said:
tschu said:
Yeah, they only polled selected people in major markets. In other words, this is horribly skewed against the state of Nebraska.
Who cares anyway, we know who we are.
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I don't know that they necessrily polled people in major markets...I mean it was an online survey but they certainly did put a lot of weight into them in their write up which is too bad.

NYC is not a college football town. Sorry. They tried to put it into perspective but still...
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Part of it was a survey of the top 200 media markets in the U.S. ...which excludes a ton of Nebraska

 
Bucky said:
krc1995 said:
Ohio State and Nebraska have roughly the same amount of fans based on student enrollment. OSU is roughly 2.5 times bigger then UNL
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Wait what? I'm confused.

Ohio State: ~57,000 students

Nebraska: ~25,000 students
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maybe Wisconsin math is different- 24000/61000 is 2.54

 
krc1995 said:
Bucky said:
krc1995 said:
Ohio State and Nebraska have roughly the same amount of fans based on student enrollment. OSU is roughly 2.5 times bigger then UNL
Click to expand...
Wait what? I'm confused.

Ohio State: ~57,000 students

Nebraska: ~25,000 students
Click to expand...
maybe Wisconsin math is different- 24000/61000 is 2.54
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Funny. :mellow:

I'm saying that I don't understand how you can say in one sentence that OSU and UNL have the same number of students/fans and then come right back in the next sentence and say that they do not.

 
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