Article Looks At Who Big Ten, Other Leagues Should Add

The Boiling Point: The New York Times tries to sort through where college football fans are located, and who they cheer for, in hopes of making sense of conference realignments.

The New York Times has posted a rather lengthy study trying to figure out where in the United States college football fans are located, and who those fans actually cheer for.

"“The premise of the study is this: take the 210 television media markets in the United States, figure out how many college football fans they have, and then allocate them between the 120 current Football Bowl Subdivision programs.”"

This study actually is pretty interesting and gives a good look at why teams are realigning, while showing what people mean when they talk about adding schools simply for the TV market. This comes up a lot when people discuss Rutgers, who has the most college football fans in New York City, but still is supported by only 20% of the football fans in the city.

The article specifically talks about how the Big Ten can afford to be picky because it has the top three most popular football programs:

To see more of what the study had to say about the Big Ten and WHO the league should add, follow the jump.

"“The Big Ten can afford to be picky. Ohio State, Michigan and Penn State are the three most popular college football teams in the country, according to our study. Seven Big Ten teams, including new addition Nebraska, rank in the top 20 nationally. And all but one Big Ten school is in the top 50, the lone exception being Northwestern, which has the Chicago market and strong academics going for it."

"The only plausible additions that would allow the Big Ten to improve upon its average of about 1.5 million fans per team are Notre Dame (2.3 million fans) and Texas (also 2.3 million). But good luck adding those schools."

"Missouri, with 1.1 million fans — about as many as Nebraska — wouldn’t be far from the league average. Kansas (0.8 million) would be more of a stretch from a football standpoint but could bring in substantial college basketball revenues."

"There’s also long been talk of the Big Ten expanding into the Notheast. But Rutgers (0.9 million fans) and Connecticut (0.6 million) are only middling targets on their own merits because of the relatively low enthusiasm for college football in the region (the same would have gone for Syracuse or Pittsburgh, which just decided to join the A.C.C.)."

"Then again, we estimate that there are about 0.6 fans of the current Big Ten schools in the New York City market alone, so a lot of people might tune in hoping to see one of these schools lose."

"One outside-the-box target: Virginia Tech. In addition to its natural (and quite avid) fan base in western Virginia, it also has some reach into Washington, D.C. and other relatively populous markets — enough for it to rank 13th in the country with 1.3 million fans.”"