Which College Team Has The Biggest Online Following?
Dedicated Websites: Sites dedicated specifically to a school’s team. This includes fan blogs, but only those dedicated specifically to that specific team.
Social Media. There are a million social media platforms out there, but we stuck with the big 3: Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter.
Message Boards: Again, only those specifically dedicated to a specific team.
Search engine searches: We used Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Duckduckgo.
We put together a scoring system, giving each FBS team a score in each of those four categories, looking at subs, fans, traffic.. basically every number we could find. (We stuck with BCS, but there are a number of non BCS schools that have huge followings; by our score, North Dakota State and James Madison, for example, would have cracked the BCS top 50 ) Divided the total by 4, and used that score to compile our list.
Some things came as no surprise. Ask any football fan who they think would end up on top of a list like this, most will no doubt mention Ohio State, ‘Bama, and Clemson. And they would be right. But there were also some that surprised us. Who knew that BYU and Rutgers have huge online followings? Some teams known to have amazing fan bases ranked surprisingly low; it turns out some of them have huge support at home, but not much across the country.
Is this scientific? Maybe a little. But it was a blast for us to do, and it does make a great discussion. So below, you will find all 130 FBS schools, in order.
Social Media. There are a million social media platforms out there, but we stuck with the big 3: Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter.
Message Boards: Again, only those specifically dedicated to a specific team.
Search engine searches: We used Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Duckduckgo.
We put together a scoring system, giving each FBS team a score in each of those four categories, looking at subs, fans, traffic.. basically every number we could find. (We stuck with BCS, but there are a number of non BCS schools that have huge followings; by our score, North Dakota State and James Madison, for example, would have cracked the BCS top 50 ) Divided the total by 4, and used that score to compile our list.
Some things came as no surprise. Ask any football fan who they think would end up on top of a list like this, most will no doubt mention Ohio State, ‘Bama, and Clemson. And they would be right. But there were also some that surprised us. Who knew that BYU and Rutgers have huge online followings? Some teams known to have amazing fan bases ranked surprisingly low; it turns out some of them have huge support at home, but not much across the country.
Is this scientific? Maybe a little. But it was a blast for us to do, and it does make a great discussion. So below, you will find all 130 FBS schools, in order.
1. Clemson
5. Texas A&M
6. Ohio St.
7. Miami (Fla.)
9. LSU
10. Florida
14. Georgia
21. Penn St.
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