ESPN’s College GameDay has amassed a wide variety of fans since its inception in 1987 and its move to the road in 1993, and where the show winds up each week is always interesting. GameDay visits both massive matchups (such as LSU-Alabama, which they’ve gone to a record nine times, or Ohio State-Michigan, which saw an expansion of the broadcast to five hours) and less-prominent ones (such as Western Michigan-Buffalo or James Madison – Richmond), tries to cover stories from all over the college football world, and attracts fans from all over the place.
Which schools’ fans spend the most time tweeting about GameDay, though? Well, CollegeStats.org scraped Instagram and Twitter posts with the #GameDay and #CollegeGameDay hashtags from within a one-mile radius of many universities, and put together some interesting infographics from that data (found via For The Win). One looks at how frequently particular team hashtags were tweeted with those GameDay tags:
So, Florida State not only takes top spot, but has ninth, tenth and twelfth as well. Alabama has second and seventh, and USC and Clemson round out the top four (with USC also having eighth, seventeenth and eighteenth). Oh, and guess what conference’s hashtag was most tweeted with #GameDay?
That’s just shocking and completely unexpected. No one ever sees fans of SEC schools using the conference hashtag. An infographic that is a little more actually surprising is which schools’ fans posted the most raw mentions of #GameDay and #CollegeGameDay, though:
That’s remarkable, especially as James Madison hasn’t hosted since last year, Auburn hasn’t hosted since 2013, Virginia has never appeared or hosted, and Syracuse has never hosted. The latter two haven’t even been that impressive in football recently, and they’re not what you would think of for rabid interest in GameDay. Apparently people there are all about using that hashtag, though. Who knows, if they keep it up, maybe Virginia and/or Syracuse will get to host GameDay themselves some day…
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