Emory Sports Marketing Analytics always ranks fan bases around college football during the preseason, and they just released their 2014 rankings.

In the SEC, all 14 teams truly have great fan bases. But anytime anyone ranks fan bases, somebody is first…and somebody has to be last.

The rankings are based on Fan Equity Rankings, which you can read about here. Below is a quick summary, via Emory Sports Marketing Analytics.

Our approach is data and statistically driven, as we look at how fans support their teams after controlling for how well the team performs on the field, the market it plays in, and school characteristics. For the fan equity analysis, we build a statistical model using publicly available data from the last fourteen years that predicts team revenues as a function of metrics related to team performance such as winning percentage, bowl participation, and other factors such as number of students, stadium capacity, etc. We then compare actual revenues over the last few years to what is predicted by our model. Please click here for an explanation of why we use this approach to fan equity measurement. Click here for more information on the methodologies behind our studies of fan quality in general.

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