New Study Ranks College Football's Most Engaged Fan Bases

The college football season is already creeping up on us, and nobody knows this more than diehard fans of the NCAA’s most football crazy schools. But of all the football programs out there, which one has the most engaged fan base? To find out, TicketCity designed an algorithm to identify which fans were the most frequently engaged with their team both online and offline. So, factors such as home attendance and ticket prices were combined with Facebook and Twitter statistics in order to come up with an overall engagement score. Here’s the breakdown of the scoring metrics and the corresponding weight each piece of data was given (based on the 2012 season):

– Average total attendance, all games (5)
– Average home attendance (10)
– Average ticket price, all games (5)
– Average home game ticket price (10)
– Percentage of stadium capacity filled at home games (10)
– Facebook likes & Facebook “talking about” (6)
– Twitter following (3)

And the winner

is… the University of Michigan! This comes as a small surprise, considering it beat out teams with much more recent success, like SEC powerhouses Alabama and LSU. It also beat out Big Ten rival Ohio State, which came in fourth. Overall, though, the universities listed in the top 25 are ones you would expect and are all from major conferences. Here is the list of College Football’s Top 25 Most Engaged Fans:

Rank	Conference	Institution	Overall Score
1	Big 10	University of Michigan	100
2	SEC	Louisiana State University	95.43
3	SEC	University of Alabama	95.18
4	Big 10	Ohio State University	92.94
5	SEC	Texas A&M University	88.91
6	Big 10	University of Nebraska – Lincoln	87.88
7	Big 12	University of Oklahoma	82.77
8	Big 12	University of Texas – Austin	82.11
9	SEC	University of Georgia	81.83
10	SEC	University of Florida	79.86
11	Big 10	Penn State University	75.68
12	SEC	University of South Carolina	72.13
13	Big 10	University of Iowa	72.08
14	Pac 12	University of Southern California	71.97
15	Pac 12	University of Oregon	70.53
16	Big 10	Michigan State University	70.52
17	SEC	University of Tennessee	68.57
18	Big 10	University of Wisconsin – Madison	68.29
19	SEC	Auburn University	66.4
20	ACC	Clemson University	65.85
21	Big 12	West Virginia University	65.53
22	ACC	Florida State University	63.92
23	SEC	University of Missouri	63.82
24	SEC	University of Arkansas	60.88
25	ACC	Virginia Tech	59.51

Check out the full results from the study at TicketCity.com.

New Study Ranks College Football’s Most Engaged Fan Bases