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I bet most of you could guess most of the largest TV markets in the United States without checking Wikipedia: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, etc. The metropolitan areas with the most people tend to track with the number of potential television viewers.
But a new report from Nielsen provides another data point that illustrates something most fans (and industry professionals) already knew: The largest markets aren’t automatically the largest markets for college football. In fact, there’s almost zero overlap.
Nielsen looked at more than just TV ratings to come up with a metric that evaluates depth of fanhood. Per the report, its rankings system “draws on eight distinct metrics to capture the full spectrum of fan engagement: apparel purchases, general interest levels, live-event attendance, betting intent, social media engagement, radio listenership, streaming habits, and linear TV viewership.”
Add it all up, and here’s what the computers spit out:
Of those 20 markets, only Atlanta (No. 7) and Cleveland (No. 19) are in the top 20 Designated Market Areas. A whopping zero of Nielsen’s top 20 college football markets are in the Mountain or Pacific time zones; the Midwest and Southeast almost completely dominate.
I understand some folks will quibble over what the “flagship” programs are in some of these markets. No disrespect to any of my readers who work at the University of Cincinnati athletic department, for example, but I suspect there are more Ohio State fans in that DMA than Kentucky or Cincinnati fans, and I know Atlanta is a disputed territory beyond just Georgia and Georgia Tech. It’s also reasonable to wonder, as my pal Bryan Fischer did here, just exactly what “betting intent” means. If you’re scraping data from sports books, that would undercount states like Texas, Utah, and Minnesota.
But still!
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A bi-weekly look at the rapidly changing licensing landscape in college sports, as part of a paid sponsorship with Desert Cactus.
When EA Sports College Football was released two years ago, it made big news — and not just because it marked the return of a beloved video game after an 11-year pause. There would, crucially, be a major difference between the new game and its predecessor: Players would be named. And, as a result, they'd be paid for the licensing of their NIL.
It was a unique compensation structure; each athlete who agreed to be featured received $600. A single negotiated group license covered hundreds of athletes at once. And, it turns out, that model scales way beyond video games and apparel.
The group licensing category that's about to make big waves? Collectibles.
In June, Panini America and Pathway Sports and Entertainment announced they'd partnered to create and sell trading cards featuring current college athletes, who are compensated through Pathway's royalty program, a group licensing model. The cards, which will launch this fall, include athletes from major programs — Michigan, USC, Texas Tech and Notre Dame — with more schools expected to join. And, perhaps most interesting, the program transcends football and basketball, featuring athletes who compete in Olympic sports like volleyball, softball and more.
As group licensing infrastructure transcends revenue sports and video games, it's built to include Olympic sports from the get-go, not as an afterthought. This is a trend athletic departments and licensing agencies would be smart to keep eyes on; with group licensing templates, they can plug into new revenue categories like collectibles without renegotiating from scratch. And schools that include their Olympic athletes in these expanding categories now will help those athletes earn measurable royalty checks as the space grows.
Headquartered in the Chicago area, Desert Cactus is a fast-growing e-commerce company specializing in officially licensed and custom merchandise for more than 650 colleges and universities.
