A Statistical Analysis of Factors Determining TV Viewership in College Football

Alyssa Gottfredsen

Determining viewership of regular season college football games is important for networks to decide which games to air on their channel–notably when game times conflict. We wanted to find out which variables went into determining viewership and the effect of each variable. In order to do this, we gathered data from online resources then analyzed the data regression in R to create a predictive model for viewership. We developed various models and compared their prediction performance. Of the models we tested, our final model is the most simple and accurate. In our final model we found that network, fan base, team rank, and if the game was a conference championship game were the most important factors in determining viewership.