Super Sunday: No Super Bowl Team, No Problem

The New England Patriots might not be front and center this year, and maybe our quarterback is wintering in Florida this time around, but Boston still ranks as the third best city for football fans this season, according to the annual Super Bowl rankings done by WalletHub.

Every year, the company does an analysis based on several metrics about which city has the best football fans. Naturally, with the Patriots on top – and despite a meager following of college football, which is also ranked – Boston has come out in the top part of the list for years. Even with some of the magic missing, this year Boston landed and #3 for the best football town.

“Boston is the third best football city for fans,” said WalletHub Analyst Jill Gonzalez. “The Patriots’ performance level is the sixth highest among NFL teams, and they’ve won six NFL Championships, topping all the other teams. They also have 21 division championship wins, the fourth most, and the second highest franchise value in the country. Other reasons why Boston ranks so high include fan engagement, attendance, popularity, and the fact that they’ve had the same coach for the past ten seasons.”

This year, Boston ranked only behind Pittsburgh and Dallas, and Pittsburgh ended up on top mostly because it has a much higher following of college football than Boston.

Dallas, of course, is Dallas.

The numbers were as follows:

•Pittsburgh – 62.61

•Dallas – 55.55

•Boston – 54.19

•New York City – 49.88

•Miami, FL – 48.61

In order to determine the best and worst cities for football fans, WalletHub compared 245 U.S. cities based on 21 relevant metrics. Each metric was graded on a 100-point scale, with a score of 100 representing the most favorable conditions for football fans.

For their sample, they chose cities with at least one professional football team (NFL) or at least one college football team (NCAA, including FBS and FCS). They grouped the cities by division — “Pro Football” and “College Football” — and assigned weights to each divisional category based on its popularity among fans.

Finally, they determined each city’s weighted average across all metrics to calculate its overall score and used the resulting scores to rank-order our sample.

Due to the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the NCAA schedule for the 2019-2020 season, for some metrics we considered the values up to the 2018-2019 season. This helps to ensure a level comparison field among the teams.

Interestingly, Boston also tied Las Vegas and San Francisco for the most expensive ticket prices for a football game.

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