Some Very Scientific Analysis Says the Cowboys and Patriots Have the Best Fans in the NFL
Source – Each year, I do an analysis of NFL fandom. The analysis is grounded in economic and marketing theory, and uses statistical tools to shed light on the question of which teams have the most loyal or “best” fans. The key point of differentiation is that this is a truly quantitative analysis. It’s driven by data, not by emotion. …
The Cowboys excel on all the metrics. … The Cowboy’s average home attendance usually leads the league, fans are willing to pay high prices, and the team’s twitter following is exceptional. The Cowboys are America’s team.
The similarity across rankings gives me faith in the results. However, the fan in me still questions some of what I see. In terms of full disclosure, I grew up a Steelers fan in the 1970s and lived in the Chicago during the Bear’s glory days. As such, I bring my personal biases to the interpretation of the findings. I can’t help but to think of the Patriots as having bandwagon fans, and the Eagles ranking above the Steelers just does not seem right. …
Patriot fans may be bandwagon fans. But they have been on the bandwagon a long time. A couple of decades of success likely means that the Patriots will remain NFL royalty even after Tom Brady leaves the game. …
Fan Equity
Winners: Cowboys, 49ers, Patriots
Losers: Rams*, Raiders, Jaguars
Fan Equity looks at home revenues relative to expected revenue based on team performance and market characteristics. …
Social Media Equity
Winners: Patriots, Cowboys, Steelers
Losers: Rams, Jaguars, Titans
Social Media Equity is also an example of a “premium” based measure of brand equity. It differs from the Fan Equity in that it focuses on how many fans a team has online. …
Road Equity
Winners: The NFC East, Raiders, Patriots and Steelers
Losers: Texans, Titans and Browns
Another way to look at fan quality is how a team draws on the Road.
I have a few reactions to this, that are not at all scientific. I don’t do analysis grounded in economic and marketing theory, and uses statistical tools. I’m a social commentator, not a scientist, dammit. On matters such as this I don’t trust in analytics, I trust in what my lyin’ eyes tell me. I don’t care what your mystics and statistics say, there is no bigger lie out there than this one that says the Patriots have bandwagon fans.
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Do I claim the Pats have generations of loyal fans going stretching back to the 1930s like the Packers, Giants or Bears? Hell no. That would be lunacy. They didn’t even come into existence until 1960. Didn’t have a stadium of their own until 11 seasons later. And the day it opened it was an obsolete, prefab, concrete toilet seat located in the middle of a dirt lot that looked like the surface of Mars. They won one playoff game – in the AFL, no less – in their first 25 years of existence. The were constantly going bankrupt to the point in 1994 Will McDonough, the Adam Schefter of the Late Cretaceous period, went on Don Imus to tell the country the Patriots were moving to St. Louis. That very day they were bought by the guy who owned that cheapass stadium, Robert Kraft. From that day forward, there was never an empty seat at a Patriots game. That’s 24 years. After 34 years of suffering the fools who ran the franchise like it was a lemonade stand. So the rest of the world can take that “bandwagon” talk and shove it up your ass.
Second, I take exception to Pats fans being ranked only fifth on the road. We are a fanbase that travels. At least once a year there is a road game that becomes a complete takeover. Usually it’s a warm weather game, like the 2014 game in San Diego when the Chargers incorrectly thanked their fans for selling out the stadium at the beginning of the week, only to find out the place banged out with New Englanders. To the point Vince Wilfork said it felt like a home game. Other times we’ve invaded places like Cleveland in Week 5 of 2016, Tom Brady’s return from the Deflategate suspension. By the time he was taken out of the game, every living being in the stands was wearing a TB12 jersey or a “Free Brady” shirt. Check back with me after the December 9th game at Miami and tell me again you think there are four franchises with a better road presence than us.
Finally, the social media ranking? That is spot on. Nobody does it like us. I’ve said this before, but we’ve got the NFL itself to thank for the fact Patriots fans are the most motivated, engaged, net savvy fanbase in all of North American sports. And the most paranoid. Which is totally justified. Let anyone clap at the Patriots and they get the full arsenal of Tweets, Facebook fan pages, memes and Reddit posts fired from all directions. By way of example, the time in early 2016 when Jerry Rice called Brady a cheater, and within hours someone had dug up the video he did on ESPN admitting he used Stickum on his gloves after it was outlawed. The site Your Team Cheats is a monument to Pats fans’ paranoia, chronicling every franchise’s rule breaking and rating them on a scale of 1-5 video cameras. The NFL turned us into this monster, with all the phony baloney scandals, rule changes designed to stop things only the Patriots were doing, suspensions and stolen draft picks. The more you tighten your grip, Goodell, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.
So No. 2 on the list? That might not sound too bad, but I’ll have to unscientifically disagree. No matter what this Steelers fan says, Pats fans deserve to be No. 1.
