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For the Best & Worst of the Power Conferences, please click here

For our Non-Power Conference Top 10, please click here

For our SEC Rankings, please click here.

After a summer of examining fan quality in the NBA, NHL, MLB, NFL, and College Basketball, finally we get to the most important sport in the South, College Football. The winner this year (and last year) and probably into the distant future in our ranking of college football fan bases is the University of Texas. It’s not close. Following Texas, we have a top 5 of Notre Dame, Georgia, Florida, and Auburn.

One notable loser from our previous rankings is Penn State. The Nittany Lions dropped from the top ten to number sixteen. And what about other power schools like Alabama and LSU? They finished 11th and 12th, respectively.

Our approach is data and statistically driven, as we look at how fans support their teams after controlling for how well the team performs on the field, the market it plays in, and school characteristics. For the fan equity analysis, we build a statistical model using publicly available data from the last fourteen years that predicts team revenues as a function of metrics related to team performance such as winning percentage, bowl participation, and other factors such as number of students, stadium capacity, etc. We then compare actual revenues over the last few years to what is predicted by our model. Please click here for an explanation of why we use this approach to fan equity measurement. Click here for more information on the methodologies behind our studies of fan quality in general.

Mike Lewis & Manish Tripathi, Emory University 2014.