It was already rumored by yesterday evening that the SEC had declined WVU.
Edit: and that NYT article, the statistics they are claiming are based on something like 30,000 responses across the country then adjusted by team revenue adjusted by fans searching for "College Football" in large media markets.
Anyone whose ever even taken an introductory statistics class can tell you that you are not going to be able to accurately predict 70 million people using a data set of 30,000. That is before you take into account that it is not even an actual random sample nor based on any type of scientifically done survey. It's based on an online poll. Give me a day and we could have 50,000,000 Nebraska fans.
Franky its misleading bull, and whoever wrote it should be ashamed at themselves for even trying to use those "statistics" to back any article or argument. I'm sure administrators, TV network, and conference officials who actually probably do have some of that data had a good laugh.