It's July, the dullest month of the sports calendar, when days pass slower than Rich Eisen running a 40-yard dash, and we're forced to entertain ourselves with the fact that Kevin Love's dad looks just like Ron Burgundy.
But the sports summer doldrums do come with one silver lining: It's almost college football season. In just a few (okay, several) short (okay, regulation-length) weeks, we'll all be tailgating and screaming our heads-off for our favorite teams.
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Just which college-football programs have the best fans, however, is always a topic of fierce debate. Is it LSU's bunch of bayou-dwelling maniacs? USC's sweater-wearing SoCal set? The beleaguered-yet-proud loyalists over at Penn State?
Such questions are hard to quantify, but one tech company thinks it has fan bragging rights distilled down to a science. Online ticket broker TicketCity used an algorithm to rank the top fan bases in college football. Their secret sauce takes into account Twitter followings, Facebook likes and "talking about" metrics, as well as a variety of IRL factors including attendance, percentage of stadium capacity filled at home games and home ticket prices from the 2012 season.
Is this a definitive and precise measurement? Of course not. Is it an entertaining way to account for both digital and real-world fandom, while passing some time during the gruelingly uneventful off-season? You bet. Here, below, is TicketCity's top 25:
University of Michigan
Louisiana State University
University of Alabama
Ohio State University
Texas A&M University
University of Nebraska
University of Oklahoma
University of Texas
University of Georgia
University of Florida
Penn State University
University of South Carolina
University of Iowa
University of Southern California
University of Oregon
Michigan State University
University of Tennessee
University of Wisconsin
Auburn University
Clemson University
West Virginia University
Florida State University
University of Missouri
University of Arkansas
Virginia Tech University
Not a whole lot of surprises here, as it essentially reads like a who's who of college football's big-time programs. Nonetheless, you may have some new bragging rights over your sports-crazed friends -- assuming, of course, they're not Michigan fans.
How does your team stack up? Let us know in the comments.