This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/cfb by /u/why_doineedausername on 2023-12-24 19:04:03.
Over the month of December, I have been working on a huge project to measure the sentiment of fanbases across college football. As of the time of writing, I had received nearly 1600 responses represented 118 fanbases, 70 of which had at least 5 replies. This was the most time intensive project I’ve ever done, putting in at least 70 hours of my time at this point.
If you haven’t yet taken the survey, you can find that here.
The full results can be viewed in this spreadsheet, which live updates as responses come in. This sheet contains individual team reports, superlatives and conference-level summary data.
| Conference | Responses |
|---|---|
| Big Ten | 416 |
| SEC | 309 |
| Pac-12 | 270 |
| Big 12 | 207 |
| ACC | 177 |
| MWC | 65 |
| MAC | 36 |
| American Athletic | 30 |
| Sun Belt | 27 |
| Conference USA | 4 |
The best-represented teams were Ohio State, Utah and Arkansas. I’d like to highlight some of the conference-level tops and bottoms. Superlatives were calculated using % of possible vote share. Teams were disqualified from voting for themselves as best fans, so the votes of their own fans were not included in the denominator of the vote share calculation. Another way to say this is that superlative voting was based only on how fans of other teams viewed a given team. Each fan got 1 vote for the “best” fans in their conference and 1 vote for the “worst” fans; I left best and worst open to individual interpretation. What this looks like as a formula is (Votes for Team A) / (Total votes by fans of other teams in Team A’s conference) = Team A vote share%.
Additionally, head coach sentiment scores are scaled from -1 to 1, where 0 is a neutral sentiment.
The highest scores in these categories
| Conference Averages | Satisfaction | Future Optimism | Head Coach Sentiment |
|---|---|---|---|
| SEC | Georgia | Ole Miss | Missouri |
| ACC | NC State | Louisville | Louisville |
| Big Ten | Michigan | Michigan State | Northwestern |
| Big 12 | Iowa State | Texas | Iowa State |
| Pac-12 | Washington | Arizona | Arizona |
| MWC | Wyoming | Utah State | Utah State |
And the lowest scores in these categories
| Conference Averages | Satisfaction | Future Optimism | Head Coach Sentiment |
|---|---|---|---|
| SEC | Florida | Arkansas | Arkansas |
| ACC | Virginia Tech | North Carolina | North Carolina |
| Big Ten | Nebraska | Minnesota | Illinois |
| Big 12 | West Virginia | Cincinnati | Cincinnati |
| Pac-12 | Stanford | UCLA | UCLA |
| MWC | Colorado State | Colorado State | Wyoming |
I will let y’all explore the conference level superlatives, but for the OVERALL superlative of most disliked fanbase (of which each fan got exactly 1 vote), these were the results:
| Rank | Most Overall Disliked | Vote Share |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Alabama | 21.8% |
| 2 | Ohio State | 21.6% |
| 3 | Michigan | 14.5% |
| 4 | Texas | 5.0% |
| 5 | Texas A&M | 3.6% |
Alabama and Ohio State have been absolutely neck and neck the whole time.
If you’re interested in a specific conference’s results, check out their subreddit where I did a bit more in detail post about each conference.
Edit: Would just like to note that the primary purpose of this survey is to let fans express their sentiment towards their own teams, and the superlatives were just a secondary feature.
I really enjoyed this project and interacting with so many fans. I hope I hear from you in the comments and get to engage in some discourse! Let me know what you found interesting. Happy Holidays!