NYTimes: The Geography of College Football Fans

N

Nexus

All-American
Mods, feel free to move this thread to another section. I thought it'd get more views here since there is statistical data related to Nebraska fandom. It's a long read too.

Surveys find that about one-quarter of the United States population, or between 75 and 80 million people, follow college football regularly. But which teams do they align themselves with?
This question is not easy to answer, but we’re going to make an effort to resolve it, and then use the results to shine a light on college football’s increasingly complicated realignment picture.

http://thequad.blogs...haos/?src=twrhp
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Interesting, but flawed in a way that disproportionately hurts teams like Nebraska, and favors more urban-based teams like Ohio State:

It only counts the top 210 media markets. Nebraska has a lot of fans in rural areas in Nebraska and South Dakota especially that aren't going to be counted.

 
HuskerLuke said:
Interesting, but flawed in a way that disproportionately hurts teams like Nebraska, and favors more urban-based teams like Ohio State:

It only counts the top 210 media markets. Nebraska has a lot of fans in rural areas in Nebraska and South Dakota especially that aren't going to be counted.
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This is true, but the article more or less made a disclaimer that this wasn't a thorough breakdown. Even suggesting that if someone was up to the task to dig even deeper to get a more accurate analysis. But flaws aside, we have a basic idea at least.

The other thing that would've made this article even better is if they'd included TV ratings averages for each team and its viewership dynamics. Nebraska is probably Top 5-10 in that category at least.

 
There are liars, damned liars and statisticians. /jk I love articles like this. Especially from the NYTimes.

But I think this type of analysis tends to underestimate the number of Husker fans. Just look at the figure below. Is there any way in hell Iowa has more fans than Nebraska? No way.

fivethirtyeight-0919-geocolfootball-bigten-blog480.png


I think this analysis underestimates NU fans because every city in the U.S. has a smattering of NU fans. In addition to the huge fan base in Nebraska. Compare Hawkeye and Husker fans outside the states of Iowa and Nebraska. For example, compare the number of Husker watch sites nationwide to the number of Hawkeye watch sites (Are there any?). NU has a MUCH bigger fan base than Iowa. Probably somewhere in between Wisconsin's fanbase and Penn State's.

One other factor is that there are fans. And then there are FANS. Sure somebody is a fan if they check a box on a survey. A Husker FAN is gonna get the game on pay-per-view, if available, or attend a watch site. Something a casual fan might not do.

 
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That doesn’t mean that the college game isn’t extraordinarily popular. Right now, we’re seeing the highest level of search queries for [college football] since 2004. In certain regions, college football appears to be king over even the NFL. The states with the most searches for [college football] are mostly in the southern part of the country, with the notable exception of the rabid fans of the Nebraska Cornhuskers. That’s no wonder—on Saturdays, when the Huskers are playing at home, their Memorial Stadium becomes the third largest “city” in the state.
http://googleblog.bl...s-football.html

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NUance said:
One other factor is that there are fans. And then there are FANS. Sure somebody is a fan if they check a box on a survey. A Husker FAN is gonna get the game on pay-per-view, if available, or attend a watch site. Something a casual fan might not do.
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I think this is big. It's the difference between someone who MIGHT watch a game against a weak opponent, or when their season has turned bad, vs. someone who WILL watch a game no matter what.

In any case, this is a much better analysis of looking at our pull vs.a team like Rutgers and the NY market. Not perfect, but good.

 
Click on Denver with a 200 mile radius and you'll see there's about 1 Husker fan for every 7 Buffs fan. Reminds me of one of my favorite jokes ... I'll just give the punch line "I've been a Cornhusker for an hour and I already hate you Buffalos."

 
I take a friend, fan, or foe to a watch site out here in Denver and they are BLOWN AWAY by the turnout of Cornhusker fans. Especially if i take them to a different one the next week, meaning we hit 2 bars in two weeks in totally different locations and it's packed w Cornhuskers fans both weeks.

I've been to Chicago, San Diego, NY, Miami, Denver, Zurich, Seattle, and Hamburg; and you can bet if there is a Nebraska game on...there are Nebraska fans there. We might not have 9 million people in our state, but we have millions of fans world wide...

 
The television ratings don't exactly mesh with the fan estimates. We averaged something like a 3.57 in 2009--significantly better than Notre Dame, whose biggest game was a 3.2 that year (USC). The Big XII title game was something close to 11, IIRC, which was then the second-best ratings for a Saturday night game on ABC.

Texas already played A&M on Saturday night that year, so it wasn't the inclusion of Texas to that title game which drove the ratings...just sayin'.

 
matthew_m_g said:
The television ratings don't exactly mesh with the fan estimates. We averaged something like a 3.57 in 2009--significantly better than Notre Dame, whose biggest game was a 3.2 that year (USC). The Big XII title game was something close to 11, IIRC, which was then the second-best ratings for a Saturday night game on ABC.

Texas already played A&M on Saturday night that year, so it wasn't the inclusion of Texas to that title game which drove the ratings...just sayin'.
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There are so many factors to take into account though. There aren't nearly as many games on in the first week of December, so the competition was low to non existent.

 
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