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NOTREDAMECHIEF
Legend
Notre Dame’s Fighting Irish Remains Nation’s Favorite College Football Team, According to Latest Harris Poll
On-field performance typically plays a role in a team’s showing in the "favorites" rankings, but this year the two are only loosely correlated. Only a handful of teams in the top ten are currently ranked in the top 25 in the AP Poll, the USA Today/ESPN Coaches Poll or the BCS standings.
Perhaps due to allegiance to alumni or a given state, college football appears to have a more stable fan base than professional football, despite the changing fortunes of a given team. While Notre Dame and Penn State continue to struggle to regain national prominence on the field, their fan support remains firm.
Oklahoma – who has performed as well as any other top college football program over the past few years – actually falls out of the top 10 this year, lending credence to the gap between popularity and performance.
Also of note, while the Big 10 always boasts a few fan favorites, this year its popularity has surged with three teams out of the top five – Ohio State, Michigan and Penn State – and four out of the top ten when including Wisconsin.
By contrast, this year, the state of Florida has its worst showing ever – for the first time, no Floridian college football team (University of Florida, Florida State, or Miami) holds even one spot in the top 10.
These are some of the results of an online survey conducted by Harris Interactive between October 20 and 25, 2004 among a nationwide cross section of 2,114 U.S. adults of whom 789 say they follow college football.
While interest in college football was on the rise in the late 1990s, this year it holds steady as 35 percent of U.S. adults report following college football – virtually the same as the last two years. Its popularity is highest among men and southerners.
Next come Ohio State, Michigan, Texas and Penn State
The Fighting Irish of Notre Dame may not be the country’s best performing college football team, but they are #1 in the hearts of U.S. adults. They have been America’s favorite college football team every year since The Harris Poll<SUP>®</SUP> first started asking this question in 1997 (with the exception of 2000 and 2001 as Harris Interactive<SUP>®</SUP> did not poll on this topic during these years). They are followed by Ohio State, which for the first time unseats Florida State for the #2 spot, while Florida State (which has been #2 for the past seven years) drops precipitously out of the top 10.On-field performance typically plays a role in a team’s showing in the "favorites" rankings, but this year the two are only loosely correlated. Only a handful of teams in the top ten are currently ranked in the top 25 in the AP Poll, the USA Today/ESPN Coaches Poll or the BCS standings.
Perhaps due to allegiance to alumni or a given state, college football appears to have a more stable fan base than professional football, despite the changing fortunes of a given team. While Notre Dame and Penn State continue to struggle to regain national prominence on the field, their fan support remains firm.
Oklahoma – who has performed as well as any other top college football program over the past few years – actually falls out of the top 10 this year, lending credence to the gap between popularity and performance.
Also of note, while the Big 10 always boasts a few fan favorites, this year its popularity has surged with three teams out of the top five – Ohio State, Michigan and Penn State – and four out of the top ten when including Wisconsin.
By contrast, this year, the state of Florida has its worst showing ever – for the first time, no Floridian college football team (University of Florida, Florida State, or Miami) holds even one spot in the top 10.
These are some of the results of an online survey conducted by Harris Interactive between October 20 and 25, 2004 among a nationwide cross section of 2,114 U.S. adults of whom 789 say they follow college football.
While interest in college football was on the rise in the late 1990s, this year it holds steady as 35 percent of U.S. adults report following college football – virtually the same as the last two years. Its popularity is highest among men and southerners.
TABLE 1
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Captain Hindsight
The Hero of the Modern Age
Sorry, but I had to jump on this...
Archie won two Heisman trophies and was the only player in college football history to do so. Brady Quinn, at maximum, can win one Heisman trophy. I'm sure that he will be at the worst, a decent QB in the NFL. However, you can't say that he's coached by the "best," as stated earlier, when Weis hasn't coached, but one year, and has yet to send a QB into the pros, and as Steve stated earlier, Willingham was annointed as a "God" after leading the Irish to a great record after his first season, and we all know what fate he met...
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Captain Hindsight
The Hero of the Modern Age
This article may also be found on BlueandGold.com, where it was originally produced and edited...
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Thanks BCSBust. Found on a ND board, where it should be. You want to sing the praises of Notre Dame, go to those boards. Sorry, but you're just not going to find a love fest of ND/Weis on this board. Respect (from a football standpoint), yes. But, that's about it.
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more of the same from NDC. Like I said the last time he went off, I look forward to his next "apology".
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Captain Hindsight
The Hero of the Modern Age
more of the same from NDC. Like I said the last time he went off, I look forward to his next "apology".
I'm not sure that he's necessarily "going off." He just apparently doesn't agree with us (which is completely understandable) because he's a Domer. However, if he does go off or complain, he might want to take some time off, or go somewhere else for awhile, before things get out of hand, or someone ends up getting offended. By the way, NotreDameChief, you're thoughts, views, and presence are always welcome here in BP (in my book). Differentiation in opinion makes discussion so much more enjoyable and entertaining.
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Deety
Head Coach
The article comes from an ND site, but the Harris Poll it cites is not ND-related. However...
I don't see where NDC has crossed any lines. BN27, you are going to have to push harder than that.
When 63% of those surveyed don't even follow college football, you're mostly just measuring name recognition. People who don't really have a preference or aren't really into football probably name either a) whatever is closest or b) whatever they know. I don't think anyone would argue that most people have heard of ND football. So if you want to equate name recognition and popularity, that's fine... much like commercials make Coke and Pepsi popular.
I don't see where NDC has crossed any lines. BN27, you are going to have to push harder than that.
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When a bowl game as huge as the Fiesta Bowl pits Ohio State against Notre Dame for only the fifth time in their storied histories--not to mention take a 3-2 lead in the all-time serie--and we have considerably more fans make the trek despite having to travel 5-6 hours longer, yeah I'd say that makes us the bigger fan base.
And what polls are you talking about? www.fatblarneysmoker.com? Links?
We may have had this 'argument" many times before but it hasn't been me that has lost each time. Face it...you're #2, so get used to it.
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Not so fast, here is the actual way that the ranking was determined (see http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/index.asp?PID=519). The first and second teams were added together. This is called "adding the top two boxes" in market research.
Adding top box scores causes what we call a "confound" in marketing research. That is, it result in imprecision in the meaning of the added rank. The analysis by Harris Polls is flawed for a few reasons.
First, they don't report the average rank. If Ohio State and Notre Dame are within 2%, then there is no statistical difference between them. Second, adding and averaging ranks is statistically invalid because ranks have no metric.
Here's what I mean by that. A person may rate three teams on a scale of favorites as 100, 90 and 80 on a 100 point scale. The next person may rank them 90, 60 and 100 and the next may not have a firm favorite and score them 10, 80, and 5 Averaging the ranks 1,2,3/2,3,1/2,1,3 would tell us that they are ranked 1.7/2/2.3 or as 1/2/3.
If we average the ratings, which are a more precise and meaningful scale of "favorite" that measures across equal intervals (like a thermometer), then they score 67/77/62 or as 2/1/3. So, a team that no one rates as #1 can be the most popular. The same thing can happen when top two box ranks are averaged.
One way to avoid this would have been to report the first and second box scores for the research.
In this case, it is possible that Notre Dame has the highest ranking in this poll because it is ranked #2 by a certain group of fans. For instance, if I am a Roman Catholic fan of Minnesota, I might still have Notre Dame in my consideration set as my #2, simply because they are the best performing Catholic university.
Notre Dame could have been ranked #1 by nobody and still come out #1 ranked on this list.
We do owe you a vote of thanks because of what these results show. Look closely at the numbers. During one of the most disgusting smear campaigns to ever hit a university, Ohio State's fanbase grew!
It also is possible that Ohio State was cited as the favorite team by more respondents than Notre Dame and that Notre Dame scored higher on the aggregate because more people ranked it #2.
There's a final issue. The poll does not reflect the current rankings but rather the rankings in November 2004, before the real meltdown in South Bend and before the humiliating loss to Ohio State (again). USC also probably has climbed since then and LSU dropped a bit.
In any event, take it from someone with a doctorate in marketing research, your poll says nothing of the sort about your team having the #1 fan base in America. It says a lot more about Ohio State's fanbase. The results are based on only some 700 respondents out of a national sample of 2200 who indicated that they follow college football. How many people who don't follow college football, but still have a favorite team, would vote for Ohio State? I might add that even in a country the size of South Africa, which has only 45 million people, we would generally not consider a sample that is so small to truly be representative of the nation.
Perhaps I can close with a comment that we can agree on. Seeing as how Notre Dame supporters are so good at turning a close loss into a victory, I guess we can all now agree that the Buckeyes won this poll and consequently "deserve' to be ranked #1, eh? :tongue2:
TABLE 3
MOST POPULAR COLLEGE FOOTBALL TEAMS
"What is your favorite college football team?"
"What is your second favorite college team?"
(First and second choices combined)
Base: Adults who follow college footballMOST POPULAR COLLEGE FOOTBALL TEAMS
"What is your favorite college football team?"
"What is your second favorite college team?"
(First and second choices combined)
<CENTER><TABLE cellSpacing=0 width=450 border=1><TBODY><TR><TD>
</TD><TD>
</TD><TD colSpan=6>
Rank
</TD></TR><TR><TD>
2004 Rank
</TD><TD>
</TD><TD>
1997
</TD><TD>
1998
</TD><TD>
1999
</TD><TD>
2002
</TD><TD>
2003
</TD><TD>
2004
</TD></TR><TR><TD>
1
</TD><TD>Notre Dame
</TD><TD>
1
</TD><TD>
1
</TD><TD>
1
</TD><TD>
1
</TD><TD>
1
</TD><TD>
1
</TD></TR><TR><TD>
2
</TD><TD>Ohio State
</TD><TD>
7
</TD><TD>
6
</TD><TD>
5
</TD><TD>
3
</TD><TD>
4
</TD><TD>
2
</TD></TR><TR><TD>
3
</TD><TD>Michigan
</TD><TD>
5
</TD><TD>
4
</TD><TD>
3
</TD><TD>
8
</TD><TD>
6
</TD><TD>
3
</TD></TR><TR><TD>
4
</TD><TD>Texas
</TD><TD>
*
</TD><TD>
*
</TD><TD>
10
</TD><TD>
6
</TD><TD>
8
</TD><TD>
4
</TD></TR><TR><TD>
5
</TD><TD>Penn State
</TD><TD>
3
</TD><TD>
3
</TD><TD>
4
</TD><TD>
4
</TD><TD>
3
</TD><TD>
5
</TD></TR><TR><TD>
6
</TD><TD>LSU
</TD><TD>
*
</TD><TD>
*
</TD><TD>
*
</TD><TD>
*
</TD><TD>
9
</TD><TD>
6
</TD></TR><TR><TD>
7
</TD><TD>USC
</TD><TD>
6
</TD><TD>
2
</TD><TD>
2
</TD><TD>
2
</TD><TD>
*
</TD><TD>
7
</TD></TR><TR><TD>
7
</TD><TD>Wisconsin
</TD><TD>
*
</TD><TD>
*
</TD><TD>
*
</TD><TD>
7
</TD><TD>
*
</TD><TD>
7
</TD></TR><TR><TD>
9
</TD><TD>Tennessee
</TD><TD>
*
</TD><TD>
*
</TD><TD>
*
</TD><TD>
*
</TD><TD>
*
</TD><TD>
9
</TD></TR><TR><TD>
9
</TD><TD>Maryland
</TD><TD>
*
</TD><TD>
7
</TD><TD>
9
</TD><TD>
10
</TD><TD>
*
</TD><TD>
9
</TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE></CENTER>*Not in Top 10
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Captain Hindsight
The Hero of the Modern Age
Steve, I don't know how to say this without sounding like a suck-up, but you recently have become one of my favorite posters, here on BP.
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He hasn't gone off yet, but he will. It's happened before, this is how he has started, then he'll make an apology and "ban" himself for a while. Everybody will feel bad for him and he'll come back a few days later. Somebody will call Charlie Weis fat or make fun of how stupid it is that people like ND just because they are irish and catholic and the whole NDCycle starts over again.BCSBust said:
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Maybe this time will be different. It's not easy seeing your team get dragged down, but then this is an Ohio State board.
I didn't have the heart to ask what would happen if we had a poll about the college football team you hate the most. Any bets on that one going Notre Dame's way?
Mind you, I guess we and every other storied program would have our fair share of haters as well!
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