There is really no point to this post as it is solely meant to be a news alert. According to a recent Harris Poll, the Seattle Seahawks are the 31st most popular team in the NFL. This is a bit shocking to me for two reasons: a) their popularity within Seattle is currently unmatched and b) the closest team in proximity is either Denver or San Fran meaning that the other NW states (Oregon, Idaho, Montana) are within Seahawks territory.
The statistician in me says I should look closer and sure enough there is at least one flaw in the Harris poll: it was done online, meaning that only the most hardcore and technology savvy fans are going to participate. I question whether it is a truly representative sample of all fans.
A more appropriate study in my mind was conducted by the Nielsen Co. which developed a system for ranking the popularity of NFL teams based on each team's local and national TV rankings, how often they're mentioned on the Internet and how many visitors they attract to their official websites. The results are amazingly similar to that of the Harris Poll. The Seahawks rank 29th of 32 teams while the Cowboys finished 1st.
Again, there is no real point to my post, just some interesting information.
one way to skew some data...
ReplyDeleteif you google the term "I hate the Dallas Cowboys," will that affect their popularity according to the Nielsen study? Does the mention of them in this discussion actually help keep them on top just because they've been specifically mentioned twice now?
this might seems silly, but if you transferred this to baseball, I'd assume that the yankees are the most popular team based on the poll's criteria. however, there are commercial sites, like the yankeehater merch site that would unwittingly promote the yankees' popularity whil selling shirts with captions like "A-Rod slaps balls."