The Geography of College Football, ie. TV Markets

[OO44]

This 2011 article in the New York Times illustrates the power of the Big Ten footprint. Georgia Tech has to be in Jim Delaney's sights.

Now you understad why Alabama/Auburn is a life or death fight.

The Geography of College Football Fans (and Realignment Chaos) - NYTimes.com

 

[doclee]

Good grief! This is some amazing stuff. Iowa has more fans than all of the SEC schools, except Alabama, Auburn, and Florida. The Big Ten may not have won a national championship in a number of years, but still has the 3 most fan-populated teams in the country with OSU, Michigan, and PSU. The addition of Rutgers and Maryland will not immediately bring a lot of fans to the table, but I would guess the interest in the Big Ten in general will increase in the NY/DC areas and the conference will ultimately benefit. Give the BT a couple of years to get national playoff exposure and it may become a money machine, if it is not there already. Thanks for posting this very interesting article. Hopefully, other posters on this board will take an interest and add their comments.

 

[CAARHawk]

All you have to do is look at the Sun Belt since this column ran seriously question the findings.

 

[HawkinGoferLand]

I've said GT to B1G all along but isn't this moot now with the ACC grant of media rights? SEC teams are the only schools without it IIRC

 

[Hawknigh]

The article says, "For instance, according to Google Insights for Search, the term “college football” is searched for about 5 times as often in Birmingham, Alabama as it is in New York City, relative to overall search traffic."

So what? Have you ever searched for "college football?" I haven't. I always want something more specific than that, such as "Northern Illinois University football." A general search like "college football" would seem to be made by non-fans rather than fans!

 

[NCHawker]

I understand that they are tying to use some kind of framework...but # of google searches seems far fetched to me. Seems that 1 fan could drive a lot of those searches and fans like us already have bookmarked our sites. Still interesting but not sure I buy it. Again, they said they didn't have hundreds of thousands of dollars to do a deep study.