It looks like College Football Saturday is heating up. In case you missed it:

Football was invented in 1869

Cleats

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Dave Ragone was good

College football is immensely popular, and every Saturday, fans show up in the millions to watch. Something bothered me, though. The fan/football interaction is kind of a wordless one, devoid of formal introduction. Fans just flip on the TV and start watching, or they just pass through the gate without anyone saying hello to them. Nobody ever bothers to wish them a warm welcome!

It didn't seem right to me. So I tweeted:

welcome to college football saturday — Jon Bois (@jon_bois) August 23, 2014

I just felt like a formal welcome would be appreciated. I don't represent college football, and can't welcome anyone in an official capacity, but I thought an unofficial welcome was better than none at all. Some folks went out of their way to tell me that they appreciated the gesture, so I continued to issue the same welcome every Saturday.

That tweet, as you may have noticed, is more than a year old. I have now tweeted "welcome to college football saturday" every Saturday for the last year, and the response has been overwhelming. Here is last Saturday's tweet:

welcome to college football saturday — Jon Bois (@jon_bois) August 29, 2015

As of this writing, it's received well over 150 favorites! Holy smokes! I've been trying to keep my ego in check, because i know full well that people are really favoriting College Football Saturday. I am only your humble servant. Nonetheless, I am proud of the welcoming atmosphere I have helped create.

Along the way, an unmistakable trend has emerged. I looked up all my "welcome to college football saturday" tweets to count their favorites and retweets. After charting the data, one thing is clear to me: it looks like College Football Saturday is heating up.

The other big takeaway: folks don't seem to care about College Football Saturday very much in the fall. But between January and June, it really starts to heat up! It looks like College Football Saturday was heating up more than ever between June and August. I originally intended to draw a correlation between this and the fact that the weather is heating up -- literally -- but I felt the similarities were circumstantial at best, and I ultimately concluded that to correlate the two would be intellectually dishonest.

Nonetheless, it certainly appears that College Football Saturday is heating up. If this data is any indicator, I think we can expect this next Saturday to be the biggest College Football Saturday yet!

I didn't play football or go to college. Thanks for reading!