Fandom in college football is sometimes a touchy subject. There are teams you love more than anything in the world and teams that you hate with a fiery passion. Despite the passionate feelings, there is often a sense of respect between groups, though.
Even college football fans who can’t stand the Oregon Ducks acknowledge the team in Eugene is popular. It doesn’t matter how much you despise the green and yellow, it’s hard to deny that with the uniforms, the connection to Nike, and the rise to national prominence over the past couple of decades, the group of individuals that call themselves Oregon fans has grown exponentially.
However, a recent study that was done by SBRNet and analyzed by AL.com has a different view. The study uses polling data from the marketing research firm in partnership with the Center for Sports Analytics at Samford University, working to find out which schools in the nation have the largest fanbases for college football programs.
Our friends over at Buckeyes Wire, Wolverines Wire, Nittany Lions Wire and Roll Tide Wire have been having fun with this study, so we wanted to see what all of the fuss was about.
According to the study, Oregon doesn’t have a top-10 fan base. Neither do they have a top-20 fan base, when looking at size. Somehow, the study conducted by SBRNet determined the Ducks have the 37th largest fan base in the nation, which ranks sixth in the Pac-12 conference, boasting a total of 921,746 fans.
For reference, the No. 1 fan base per the study is Ohio State, with a number of 6,151,180. You can see why we are dubious about the data.
Of course, studies like this have all kinds of caveats based on the population polled, margin of error, time period taken, and many other facets. Regardless, that result seems pretty crazy to us, especially when talking about a national brand like Oregon that is widely recognized across the nation. For example, the Ducks garnered an average of 2.21 million viewers per game in 2022, which ranks 12th in the nation.
While there are a lot of teams in the 36 spots ahead of Oregon that belong there, we have differing opinions on some others. To help state our case, we took the reported fan-size numbers and compared them with the TV ratings data that was released for the 2022 season, looking at the average number of viewers that each team garnered per game last season.
Here are a few teams that we feel don’t belong ahead of the Ducks on fan-base size rankings:
