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Greetings from “Can’t Wait For Saturday,” your morning morsel of college football, courtesy of longtime Illini beat writer, AP Top 25 voter and Heisman state rep Bob Asmussen. He’ll give you his views each day on the game he loves.
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At the start of the story published earlier in the week, the wise folks at The Athletic admitted what they were about to try was impossible. But they did it anyway.
And readers, like me, got to enjoy the effort.
The question self-posed: What is the most popular college football team in the country?
My first thought, before getting into the text was “depends what matters to you.”
If popularity if defined by TV ratings that’s one thing. If it is home attendance or team merchandise sales those are something else.
To the credit of authors Matt Baker and Austin Meek, they used nine separate metrics. And they came down to a group of 12 schools that scored in multiple categories.
Illinois made the cut in one: living alumni. According to the story, Illinois is tied for sixth with Ohio State, Arizona State, Rutgers and Purdue with 600,000. Indiana leads all with 790,000 and eight of the Top 10 are in the Big Ten.
With a ranking for the schools in each category, Michigan ended up first overall. Followed by Ohio State, Alabama, Georgia, Texas, Penn State, Tennessee, Notre Dame, LSU, Texas A&M, Florida and Oklahoma.
What The Athletic didn’t do is rank the least” favorite schools. Many or maybe all of the Top 10 would be on that list too.
Harder to quantify a negative, but anecdotally, it is easy to imagine Ohio State fans saying Michigan is the least popular and Michigan fans saying the same about the Buckeyes.
Wonder how the basketball popularity contest lines up? Next time.
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