there are exactly 8 D-1 college football teams in the country with a smaller following of fans than OU. And five of them are in our conference.  After reading this article, it doesn't make one feel hopeful about OU and the rest of the MAC as realignment begins. 

http://thequad.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/19/the-geography-of-college-football-fans-and-realignment-chaos/

Very interesting article that explains a lot. I found it interesting that, in view of the frequent contrasting done here between the schedules of Toledo and Ohio, and the supposed impact of such scheduling on the fan base, that there was virtually no difference when it comes to fan support. This is especially surprising because one school is in a significantly larger city.

Another comment I would make is that they are tracking a shifting market. Schools are constantly trying to increase their fan base, with various levels of success. If it is true that winning is a key element in building fan support, Ohio many be able to increase their fan base somewhat this year.

Finally I would point out that 100,000 fans is but a tiny portion of the Ohio alumni base. Ohio may be able to increase fan interest two places. The first is among the region, getting support from local in SE Ohio and WV. They may also be able to build fan support among the alums. Just because the Ohio fan base is only 100,000 today doesn't mean it can't be quite a big higher a decade from now. I'm guessing that if a similar study was done 5 years ago, Ohio's fan base would have been smaller than it is today. I'm also guessing that hypothetically, if Ohio were to move to a BCS conference, their alumni base would take them more seriously, and more would support the program. To that extent it is sort of a chicken and egg situation.

I think Ohio is taking the correct approach. Win game. Promote locally, and promote to alums.  It takes awhile, though.

120 - 109 (our position) = 11. There are 11 schools with smaller followings than us, according to this data. That being said, I spy 2 methodological shortcuts that make me question our number of fans (though since they would affect most schools equally, it might not alter our relative rank)

First, I consider myself a pretty serious college football fan (I don't want to disclose how much time a day I devote to the subject) but I had never heard of common census sports map project until thisafternoon, reading this article. For such an online survey to have never passed my attention (and to only garner 30,000 responses after "several years") tells me that it was fairly obscure and implies that some groups of fans knew about it while the majority of other fans did not.

The second, and much more glaring, short-cut/error: it relies on google search queries/media market to determine who is/isn't a college football fan!** I don't know about other people on this board, but I don't know that i've ever googled "college football". I guess that means i'm not a college football fan, nevermind how i've spent my last 3 saturdays (and 3 thursday nights, and parts of 1 sunday and 1 monday, and the time I've spent writing this). It seems like new comers or non-serious fans might google "college football", but those of us in the know would go to espn, scouts.com, rivals, presnapread, collegefootballtalk, everydayshouldbesaturday, etc.

In all, I don't know how much weight to give this article, other than to assume that an editor at the NY Times asked nate to do a piece on conference realignment and nate wanted to try out a new database of google search results by media market. 


**This isn't to imply that I know of a more feasible measure of college football fandom readily divisible by area.

Silver should stick to politics. We're supposed to believe Akron has 3x the number of fans as Central Michigan? or that Buffalo has twice as many fans as Toledo? Or that Troy has 4x the number of fans as OHIO? Troy has 7K students averages around 18K in attendance and is in a town of around 18K. No way. 

c'mon, this is all a bunch of new aged hooey.

Thanks for stealing my line.

+1 for Dragon. You can shoot the messenger  if you want, but college sports powers-that-be are using stats like this over common sense when it comes to the realignment fervor. I will say, however, that in a Gold Rush most are likely to make big mistakes looking for Fools Gold.