results towards lesser teams that happen to be well situated. I suppose the argument could be made that people will tune in to watch a successful story, but I grew up near Chicago during Northwestern's Rose Bowl runs of the 90's; the stadium atmosphere was much better those few seasons but I didn't see any more purple being worn around town...

Would alumni base be a better metric? It seems on a good year they are more likely to get alumni to watch than random people with no connection to the university besides geographical proximity...