Football

It’s conference championship day for the National Football League: at the end of the day only 2 teams will be left alive in the playoffs. More than likely, your favorite team has been eliminated and you’ve been forced to switch over to your backup team(s), root against ***that*** team that everyone hates, or just indifferently watch and hope for a good football game (or good Super Bowl ads). So how did you end up with your team? (You know, that team that lost on a field goal in overtime, had a kicker clang the ball off of the upright, or the team that dropped 7 games in a row and didn’t make the playoffs?)

Fandom comes in all shapes and sizes: maybe you like the team that you grew up watching, chose a team because it had your favorite player, or maybe you support your home team. The concept of fans supporting their home team made me wonder: how many fans would each team have if their only fans lived in the region represented by their team name? To figure this out I used a few simple rules.

1. Fan totals are based on the name of the location in the team name. (So the Houston Texans only get to count Houston, not all of Texas)
2. If the location is a city, I used the 2017 Combined Statistical Area that particular city is included in. If the city isn’t in a Combined Statistical area, I used the Metropolitan Statistical Area. (This only applied to Tampa)
3. If multiple teams were in the same area, they would split the fan base evenly. (Baltimore and Washington are in the same combined statistical area, and thus split their fans.)
4. If the location is a state or collection of states, then the fanbase is the total population for those states. Minnesota, Tennessee, and Arizona were straightforward. New England includes Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Carolina is tricky: the team isn’t named the “North Carolina Panthers” and the initial marketing (and original logo) attempted to include both North and South Carolina. I’m counting the Panther fans as North and South Carolina.

Rank	Team	Fans (in millions)
1*	Carolina Panthers	15.29
2	New England Patriots	14.81
3	New York Giants	11.94
4	New York Jets	11.94
5	Chicago Bears	9.90
6	L.A. Rams	9.39
7	L.A. Chargers	9.39
8	San Francisco 49ers	8.84
9	Dallas Cowboys	7.85
10	Philadelphia Eagles	7.21
11	Houston Texans	7.09
12	Arizona Cardinals	7.02
13	Miami Dolphins	6.83
14	Tennessee Titans	6.72
15	Atlanta Falcons	6.56
16	Minnesota Vikings	5.58
17	Detroit Lions	5.34
18	Baltimore Ravens	4.88
19	Washington Redskins	4.88
20	Seattle Seahawks	4.27
21	Denver Broncos	3.52
22	Cleveland Browns	3.49
23	Tampa Bay Buccaneers	3.09
24	Pittsburgh Steelers	2.62
25	Kansas City Chiefs	2.47
26	Las Vegas Raiders	2.46
27	Indianapolis Colts	2.41
28	Cincinnati Bengals	2.24
29	Jacksonville Jaguars	1.63
30	New Orleans Saints	1.51
31	Buffalo Bills	1.21
32	Green Bay Packers	0.37

*The Panthers would drop to 4th place if only using the population of North Carolina

So there you have it! According to this chart

• There are more disappointed Panthers fans than any other fanbase
• Despite all the people rooting against the Pats, there are over 14 million New Englanders behind them
• The Steelers and Packers both punch well above their weights
• The Raiders lose about 2 million fans (and give the 49ers 4 million more fans by moving to Vegas.