As far as brands, clemson wasn’t much of a big brand till Dabo Sweeney, so a brand can be built over a 7 yr run with high level winning. Tcu did it sorta.
Clemson’s brand definitely grew in stature and prestige under Swinney.
HOWEVER, their attendance has always been huge. They’ve always had a HUGE fan base. What else is there to do in rural South Carolina?
Even back in 2000, they were averaging almost 80K per game.
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Yeah I was going to chime in here. Iowa, Illinois, and Northwestern all have pretty large alumni bases in Houston. This is mainly due to Law, Medicine and Accounting, with some engineers mixed in too. If you go to the DMV, it may as well be in Chicago there are so many BIG alum, and I am not even including Maryland. I think people really don’t understand how much of a head start these BIG schools got on everyone else by investing in education in the 19th century. That is why these BIG schools are so rich.
One of the great things about the BIG is that our alumni are everywhere. Where I live in Atlanta, while the single largest group of college alum are UGA, there are probably more BIG alum. It is like a battle of the porch flags in my neighborhood, especially Michigan, OSU, and Penn State. Cobb and Fulton counties even more so.
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Would think they could land a better gig than that.
“DMV” = DC Maryland and Virginia.
However, 10 points for wit. Well done.
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i would be curious how many oregon viewers are longtime fans, seems they are the “prime” or sexy team more than having longtime viewers, i never thought of them until chip kelly went there.
and tennessee really gets that much viewing, i must be orange biased.
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Yeah Tennessee, Florida and Auburn were the biggest surprises. Auburn is almost entirely known due to its rivalry with Bama. Florida has not been relevant in 17 years now, and Tennessee even longer.
Plus, Tennessee and Florida actually have pro teams, unlike Alabama.
I do know that in a lot of these Southern States in SEC country, your biggest fan bases are not actually alums, but your “T-Shirt” fans who never set foot on campus (as students) and likely never will. These are the kinds of people who hate pro sports because of the players and like college football because the players don’t get paid. The sort of fans most likely to walk away as college sports becomes more like pro sports.
I will definitely like to see these numbers in 10 years.
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You called it. As the student athlete become pro’s the facade will fade way along with this the t shirt fan and the making of what southern football, what it is today ,by southern I mean SEC or ACC teams in the south. As far Clemson is concern they may have been getting 80k fans sitting in their stadium they were no where a T.V. attraction until Dabo came along and built those NC teams. There last and only NC was 40 yrs before those Dabo NC teams which means they were irrelevant as far as CFB was concerned.
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Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like?
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sounds a lot like the Michigan I grew up in
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“…We have already have more Final Four Appearances than 98% of College Basketball…” And ZERO national titles. Kind of a drag on the national recognition thang.
On the original post:
This chart is misleading. As Kyle mentioned, have to look at times and channels.
The bottom 71 teams are not even given the opportunity to bring in some viewers if they are only on obscure or streaming only channels. The top teams are dominant on broadcast TV which will have much higher viewership numbers. The top teams are good, and popular, yes absolutely, but it comes with accessibility given by the media choices to show on which channels.
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College football is much like boxing was when boxing was popular.
You had your big name fighters who needed to fight pushovers to pad their records to make their fight against other big name fighters draw bigger numbers.
If the big name fighters only fought each other, it would diminish the product.
College football is about as corrupt as boxing was back then as well.
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This might be an appropriate simile and I wonder if it also applies to the nfl in their move to paid programming. I’m no expert on boxing but it’s my understanding that its decline in popularity was its switch to pay per view tv.
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CFB is self fulfilling the media folks keep pushing the same meal before you, soon you think that all there is to eat and nothing else.
Wisconsin should be off that list. No A&M? I don’t see Wisconsin and go oh boy can’t wait to watch.
Again there’s only a handful of games I’d watch like now but if they left out 112 teams, this won’t work.
So this isn’t happening and it’s just for fun
I can tell you why: In WI, it is the only game in town CFB wise, as no other school plays D-1. In addition, Wisconsin has a large alumni base not only in WI, by MN, IL and MI, plus a good amount nationwide.
To show you what I mean, I work in a law firm with about 170 lawyers based in the South, and we have 8 people who went to Wisconsin.
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