Best fans in college football
Posted: Mon Nov 10, 2014 4:28 pmVery cool read. Here is the AAC excerpt but read the whole article so you can understand how they came up with ranking:
The American Athletic Conference (AAC) is the product of conference realignment, and a fascinating story. The former Big East schools are desperately trying to construct a league that can keep the AAC in discussion of the Power 6 conferences rather than fading back into the pack. To some degree, our analyses suggest that the AAC has made a few good moves. We already rank the AAC as the number five conference, and there is reason to believe that the AAC has landed several programs with bright futures.
Number one on our list of the most supportive fan bases is SMU. This is both a surprising result, and also a result that illustrates the benefit of our approach. While the last few seasons have seen SMU take a step forward and qualify for bowl games, over the ten years of data, the team has tended to play sub .500 football. The fan support provided to SMU relative to the on field performance has been outstanding. This issue is best illustrated via a comparison between SMU and Cincinnati. Over the ten year period of our analysis, SMU was a four win per year team while Cincinnati was a seven or eight win team. However, while Cincinnati won almost double the number of games as SMU, their revenues were about 20% less. Our interpretation of these results is that SMU has a sleeping giant of a fan base, and it would like make sense for SMU to invest heavily in their program.
In second place, we have the Memphis Tigers. Memphis is fairly similar to SMU in that they have very solid support (30K+ attendance) for a team that has been average on the field. It is these two programs that tell us that the AAC may have a chance to remain a major conference. We suspect that if SMU and Memphis become on-field successes their fans will be highly supportive.
One the bottom half of our rankings, we had a couple of surprises. We have already mentioned the issue with Cincinnati. UCONN has generated revenues similar to SMU but these have been generated with a better performing team, and as a member of the former Big East. Likewise, Louisville was also a bit of a surprise. And again, the issue was that the fan support is just not what we should suspect given the Cardinals’ on-field success. The Louisville story is also interesting because in our analysis of the brand equity of college basketball teams, Louisville finished number one overall. The UConn and Louisville results suggest that it is a challenge to build fan equity in football when you are historically a basketball school.
https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/esma/col ... -football/
The American Athletic Conference (AAC) is the product of conference realignment, and a fascinating story. The former Big East schools are desperately trying to construct a league that can keep the AAC in discussion of the Power 6 conferences rather than fading back into the pack. To some degree, our analyses suggest that the AAC has made a few good moves. We already rank the AAC as the number five conference, and there is reason to believe that the AAC has landed several programs with bright futures.
Number one on our list of the most supportive fan bases is SMU. This is both a surprising result, and also a result that illustrates the benefit of our approach. While the last few seasons have seen SMU take a step forward and qualify for bowl games, over the ten years of data, the team has tended to play sub .500 football. The fan support provided to SMU relative to the on field performance has been outstanding. This issue is best illustrated via a comparison between SMU and Cincinnati. Over the ten year period of our analysis, SMU was a four win per year team while Cincinnati was a seven or eight win team. However, while Cincinnati won almost double the number of games as SMU, their revenues were about 20% less. Our interpretation of these results is that SMU has a sleeping giant of a fan base, and it would like make sense for SMU to invest heavily in their program.
In second place, we have the Memphis Tigers. Memphis is fairly similar to SMU in that they have very solid support (30K+ attendance) for a team that has been average on the field. It is these two programs that tell us that the AAC may have a chance to remain a major conference. We suspect that if SMU and Memphis become on-field successes their fans will be highly supportive.
One the bottom half of our rankings, we had a couple of surprises. We have already mentioned the issue with Cincinnati. UCONN has generated revenues similar to SMU but these have been generated with a better performing team, and as a member of the former Big East. Likewise, Louisville was also a bit of a surprise. And again, the issue was that the fan support is just not what we should suspect given the Cardinals’ on-field success. The Louisville story is also interesting because in our analysis of the brand equity of college basketball teams, Louisville finished number one overall. The UConn and Louisville results suggest that it is a challenge to build fan equity in football when you are historically a basketball school.
https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/esma/col ... -football/
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