Collecting Data on the College Game Day Experience

ReviewTrackers analyzed online review data for 147 NCAA stadiums, looking at two things:

1. Star rating for the stadiums (averaged across Google, Facebook, and other review sites).

2. Analysis of the text of 140,000 reviews for NCAA stadiums — comparing how often and how positively fans talk about the important parts of NCAA fandom.

Before we get to the rankings, a word about how text analysis works.

At ReviewTrackers, we use a natural language algorithm to read these reviews and give them a score for each important keyword in the review.

So, for example, when a Badger fan writes,

“The fans are fun and watching the student section is a treat. Especially third quarter jump around.”

Our algorithm reads the review and extracts the “student section” keyword and gives it a positive score because the reviewer calls the student section “a treat.” Which is adorable. And also exactly what someone from Wisconsin would say.

Zoom out. And apply this approach across 140,000 reviews and suddenly you have a data on 232,703 keywords across 147 different NCAA stadiums.

What do you do with 232,703 keywords? Group them into topics that are important to the college football experience.

Where there is enough data, we can score each stadium for the things like:

1. Marching bands.

2. Alumni.

3. Crowd noise.

4. Tailgates.

Compiling all that data allows us to rank stadiums overall as well as to see what makes some stadiums exceptional.