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I can basically sum it up like this. College sports are more likely to have greater popularity in cities with little to no Pro sports teams. Teams with more pro sports teams(usually Big Market cities) are less likely to prefer College level sports over Pro level sports.
But it is not always the case. Atlanta has plenty of pro-teams but college still dominates here.
People in Cleveland would sign to not letting to Ohio State Buckeyes play a game for 10 years if it would mean a Super Bowl Championship for the Browns.
And Cleveland cheers for OSU and are very loyal...but the Browns are a religion.
Pro sports are unquestionably bigger, but there is a great college vibe. Lots of different rivalries between TCU, UT, OU, SMU, Tech, A&M. Makes for very exciting weekends!
philly has a lot of colleges obviously and a rich college sports history. the palestra is basically the mecca of college basketball and big 5 basketball is of course huge. college basketball i would say is much bigger in philly than college football, but franklin field is a historic sports field in its own right and although penn state is not in philly, so many alum live in and around the city that there are tons of people wearing penn state crap all the time.
that being said. the popularity of college sports in philadelphia DOES NOT EVEN COME CLOSE to the popularity of the pro teams. The eagles and phillies are HUGE. the flyers and sixers don't enjoy the enormous fan bases that the eagles and phillies do but they have devoted fans and even the sixers in an awful year like last year, get more press than the college teams in the city.
in my experience pro sports are always way bigger in cities than collage sports.
college sports are biggest in rural areas where there aren't any pro teams around to cheer for.
side note: am I the only one who finds it dumb how people cheer for a college they didn't go to?
This is basically what I was after. My thoughts exactly. This seems to be the case except in smaller markets, but there are some exceptions like Atlanta.
This is basically what I was after. My thoughts exactly.
Of course it is. You took the one comment in this thread that agreed the most with what you already believed, and ignored the majority opinion in this thread, which stated that college sports are either bigger than pro sports or evenly split with pro sports in those posters' home cities. Atlanta, Cincinnati, Raleigh, Detroit, Baton Rouge, Austin, Lansing, Omaha, Chicago, and Syracuse were all named in this thread by residents of those cities as either being evenly split between college and pro or being more college than pro. And then a number of other people just stated that college sports in general is better than pro.
You sure? It's one of the biggest college rivalries if not the biggest. That's like saying no one cares about the Packers/Bears or Jets/Giants.
I'm actually big into football and had never heard of that rivalry before. I'm sure it's big down south, but who else really cares? College football normally just draws people who are from that immediate region or conference. Otherwise people just watch because it's a top 25 team playing. They normally don't really care who the team is, or who they have rivalries against. I would have listed off some northern teams for what I thought would be the biggest rivalry, but it's probably just because I hear the names more.
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