The Geography of College Football

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From NYT:

Surveys find that about one-quarter of the United States population, or between 75 and 80 million people, follow college football regularly. But which teams do they align themselves with?

This question is not easy to answer, but we’re going to make an effort to resolve it, and then use the results to shine a light on college football’s increasingly complicated realignment picture. {...}   One way to estimate the regional variances is to look at Google search traffic. For instance, according to Google Insights for Search, the term “college football” is searched for about 5 times as often in Birmingham, Alabama as it is in New York City, relative to overall search traffic. 

In other words, on a per-capita basis, there are probably about 5 times as many football fans in Birmingham as there are in New York. So although the New York media market is about 10 times larger, it has fewer than twice as many college football fans as Birmingham.

Full Article
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From AL.com (re: the NYT article)

In a story explaining the geography of college football fans, Birmingham has the highest percentage of fans in the nation. Birmingham's 85 percent share is more than double that of Atlanta (41) and blows away the Big Apple (14 percent).

In terms of total college football fans, Birmingham ranks sixth nationally with 1.7 million (taking the five-county TV market into account). That's a staggering number that puts the Magic City ahead of Philadelphia, Houston, Tampa-St. Pete and Detroit.