{"id":53670,"date":"2013-02-03T18:23:44","date_gmt":"2013-02-03T23:23:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=53670"},"modified":"2013-02-03T20:27:47","modified_gmt":"2013-02-04T01:27:47","slug":"steelers-vs-cowboys-which-is-americas-football-team","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2013\/02\/03\/steelers-vs-cowboys-which-is-americas-football-team\/","title":{"rendered":"Steelers vs. Cowboys: Which is America’s Football Team?"},"content":{"rendered":"

An expanded version of this post is cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Six years ago, I wrote<\/a>\u00a0that the Pittsburgh Steelers had become \u201cAmerica\u2019s Team,\u201d a title once claimed, perhaps legitimately, by the Dallas Cowboys.<\/p>\n

Now Ben Blatt at The Harvard College Sports Analysis Collective concludes<\/a>\u00a0that it\u2019s still the Cowboys:<\/p>\n

…based on their huge fan base and ability to remain the most popular team coast-to-coast, I think the Dallas Cowboys have earned the right to use the nickname\u00a0 \u2018America\u2019s Team\u2019.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To get data, Blatt posed as an advertiser and euchred Facebook into giving him some data from 155 million Facebook users, about half of the US population.\u00a0 Blatt counted the \u201clikes\u201d for each NFL team:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/div>\n

It\u2019s Superbowls X, XIII, and XXX all over again \u2013 Steelers vs. Cowboys.\u00a0 And the Cowboys have a slight edge.\u00a0 But does that make them \u201cAmerica\u2019s Team\u201d? It should be easy to get more likes when you play to a metro area like Dallas that has twice as many people as Pittsburgh.\u00a0 If the question is about \u201cAmerica\u2019s Team,\u201d we\u2019re not interested in local<\/em> support.\u00a0 Just the opposite: if you want to know who\u00a0America\u2019s<\/em>\u00a0team is, you should find out how many fans it has outside its local area.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, Blatt doesn\u2019t provide that information. So for a rough estimate, I took the number of Facebook likes and subtracted the metro area population.\u00a0 Most teams came out on the negative side. The Patriots, for example, had 2.5 million likes. but they are in a media market of over 4 million people.\u00a0 The Cowboys too wound up in the red\u00a0 3.7 million likes in a metro area of 5.4 million people.
\n\"\"<\/a>
\nLikes outnumbered population for only five teams.\u00a0 The clear winner was the Steelers.<\/p>\n Jay Livingston is the chair of the Sociology Department at Montclair State University<\/a>. You can follow him at Montclair SocioBlog<\/a> or on Twitter<\/a>.<\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An expanded version of this post is cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog. Six years ago, I wrote\u00a0that the Pittsburgh Steelers had become \u201cAmerica\u2019s Team,\u201d a title once claimed, perhaps legitimately, by the Dallas Cowboys. Now Ben Blatt at The Harvard College Sports Analysis Collective concludes\u00a0that it\u2019s still the Cowboys: …based on their huge fan base and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":258,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[274,3920,108],"class_list":["post-53670","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-methodsuse-of-data","tag-nation-united-states","tag-sports"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53670","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/258"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53670"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53670\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53705,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53670\/revisions\/53705"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}