Study says Raiders have 17th best fan base in NFL

This will be sure to rile up Raider fans. Emory college professor, Michael Lewis, has released his annual rankings of the best NFL fan bases.

Lewis is a professor of marketing and faculty director of the Emory Marketing Analytics Center at the Goizueta Business School.

According to the study the Raiders rank as the 17th best fan base in the NFL. Lewis wrote that he uses “data on attendance, revenues, social media following and road attendance to develop statistical models of fan interest.”

The top five in Lewis’s rankings, which was unchanged from the previous two years, is the Cowboys, Patriots, Eagles, Giants, and Steelers. The bottom five include the Bengals, Jaguars, Titans, Chiefs, and Rams.

Lewis added that he used those models to determine which fan bases “are more willing to spend or follow their teams after controlling for factors like market size and short-term changes in winning and losing.”

It will be interesting to see where the Raiders rank once the move to Las Vegas is completed. Without knowledge of the data that was collected, I would assume road attendance and social media following are two areas where the Raiders drew strong numbers. Revenue and attendance could see a big boost with the move to Las Vegas.