Excellent links. Same guy calculated rough valuation rating for every program. I‘d love to hear an explanation from someone actually ”in the business” on how valuations are derived but these numbers are interesting if nothing else.
No single metric tells the whole story, so I tallied up each program’s ranking in five different categories. Here are the categories:
Home attendance: The number of people attending each home game is one way to measure the size and passion of a fan base.
College Football News calculated the attendance average for every FBS school from 2015–19.
Market size/share: In 2011,
Nate Silver calculated the number of fans of each college football team using market population and survey data. The data would certainly look a bit different if redone in 2022, but it’s the strongest methodology for determining the number of fans that I’ve seen.
Valuation: After the 2019 season,
the Wall Street Journal calculated how much each college football program would be worth on the open market if it could be bought and sold like a professional sports franchise. The valuations take into account revenues and expenses, along with cash-flow adjustments, risk assessments and growth projections.
Social media following: It’s not perfect, but one easy way to measure the size of each fan base is to look at how many people follow each team on social media (Facebook, Twitter and Instagram). As TV moves over to digital, it’s valuable to look at which teams have the largest followings in the digital space.
TV viewership: Conferences expand with the goal of adding value to their TV deal, so what better metric to look at than TV viewership? I calculated each team’s average TV viewership from 2015–21 (not counting the 2020 season).
If you’re interested in the exact TV viewership numbers,
here is the data from 2015–19, and
here is the data from 2021.
After calculating each program’s ranking in those five categories, I dropped each schools’ highest and lowest metric, then averaged the rest. Here’s how 90 college football programs ranked from best to worst.
This list focuses strictly football because basketball rarely plays a large role in conference realignment.
I included all of the schools that are currently members of the ACC, AAC, Big Ten, Big 12, Mountain West, Pac-12 and SEC, as well as Army and Notre Dame.
- Ohio State
- Michigan
- Alabama
- Notre Dame
- Georgia
- LSU
- Penn State
- Texas
- Auburn
- Oklahoma
- Florida
- Texas A&M
- Clemson
- Tennessee
- Wisconsin
- Nebraska
- Michigan State
- Florida State
- Southern Cal
- Iowa
- South Carolina
- Arkansas
- Mississippi
- Oregon
- Miami
- UCLA
- Washington
- Virginia Tech
- West Virginia
- Mississippi State
- Oklahoma State
- Kentucky
- Texas Tech
- Minnesota
- Arizona State
- TCU
- Utah
- Louisville
- Missouri
- Stanford
- North Carolina
- BYU
- Iowa State
- Georgia Tech
- Pittsburgh
- Indiana
- California
- NC State
- Kansas State
- Baylor
- Purdue
- Arizona
- Northwestern
- Illinois
- Colorado
- Maryland
rest at the link