Cowboys fans are tops in the league and it annoys everyone else

America's team

With the NFL season starting up and everyone is into power ranking teams. A pair of cold-eye business professors have power ranked NFL fans. If you are thin-skinned and live outside Dallas, stop here. Emery University professors Mike Lewis and Manish Tripathi say the Dallas Cowboys have the NFL's most loyal and supportive fan base.

Lewis and Tripathi study sports marketing analytics at Emory. To rank fans, they developed a revenue premium model  that adjusts for on field success, population, stadium capacity, median income and other demographic factors ‒ all that business-related stuff you watch football to escape.

One expects big-market teams to get more revenue, but the Cowboys win because over the past three seasons they have played sub-.500 football yet generated above capacity attendance.

The Patriots, Jets, Saints and Giants round out the top five most valuable fan bases.

Forbes Magazine ranked the Cowboys and those four teams as the first, second, sixth, 23rd and fourth-most valuable NFL franchises in 2013.

The bottom five teams, ranked 28 to 32, are the Lions, Buccaneers, Cardinals, Falcons (FALCONS?) and Raiders.

So if you want to move your fan community up in team rankings, throw your money at your loyalty. Ban the bandwagon and go to every game win or lose. It's the secret of the Cowboys' success.   

(Hat tip to ex-Broncos GM Ted Sundquist for pointing me to this story.)

About Anthony Brown

Lifelong Redskins fan and blogger about football and life since 2004. Joined MVN's Hog Heaven blog in 2005 and then moved Redskins Hog Heaven to Bolguin Network. Believes that the course of a season is pre-ordained by management decisions made during the offseason. Can occasionally be found on the This Given Sunday blog and he does guest posts.

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