A study has been released that says what we already know: the Louisville Cardinals have the best fans in college basketball. It is just pretty cool to see actual studies that prove these kind of things.
The following comes from the website that released the study. I am ok with the order. Everyone in the Top 10 is probably where they should be, right? I know whenever I think of college basketball’s best fans, Texas definitely is near the top of my list.
Our rankings are based on a statistical analysis of self-reported revenue data. We create a statistical model of revenue as a function of team quality (winning percentage, NCAA tournament qualification, etc…) and market potential (conference affiliation, median income, area population, number of students, etc…) and then compare the model’s prediction to the self-reported revenues. Yes, we get that this self-reported revenue data can be a bit quirky, but it’s what the schools choose to report.
The key point in the analysis is that we are looking at support after controlling for team quality. Some of our critics seem to think that selling out a 16,000 seat arena when your team regularly wins 30 plus games and makes deep tournament runs is amazing support. Reality check: pretty much any major school would be able to sell out under these conditions.
Our overall top 15 schools are listed in the table below. Louisville repeats last year’s 1st place finish. The rest of the top five are Duke, Arizona, Texas and Xavier. Other notables include Kentucky in 7th, North Carolina in 11th and Indiana in 12th. We fully realize that Kentucky fans will once again be incensed by these rankings.
