Study: Patriots top Cowboys as NFL's best fans, Raiders surprisingly low

The study is not about smartest fans, loudest fans or craziest fans, but a 'willingness to spend'

In a surprising upset at the top of the rankings, the Cowboys were taken down from the top spot by the Patriots as the "NFL's best fans." Those gritty underdogs are at it again!

That's according to an Emory University study of NFL fans by professor Michael Lewis, which revealed a new leader in the clubhouse for best NFL fans, with New Englanders moving ahead of die-hard Texans for the "best NFL fans."

This study is not about smartest fans or loudest fans or craziest fans, however. It's more about fans behavior as consumers. One key aspect? A "willingness to spend."

From Lewis:

This year I have come up with a new method that combines these two measures: Dynamic Fan Equity (DFE). The DFE measure leverages the best features of the two measures. Fan Equity is based on the most important consumer trait -- willingness to spend. Social Equity captures fan support that occurs beyond the walls of the stadium and skews towards a younger demographic. The key insight that allows for the two measures to be combined is that there is a significant relationship between the Social Media Equity trend and the Fan Equity measure. Social media performance turns out to be a strong leading indicator for financial performance.

Dynamic Fan Equity is calculated using current fan equity and the trend in fan equity from the team's social media performance. I will spare the technical details on the blog but I'm happy to go into depth if there is interest. On the data side we are working with 15 years of attendance data and four years of social data.

I can confirm the excessive use of social media does not guarantee you're rich, although perhaps what Lewis is discussing here is a heavy usage of social media in support of the team involved.

For instance, the tiebreaker between the Cowboys and the Patriots was basically Twitter followers for the two teams. The Cowboys have 1.7 million Twitter followers, while the Patriots have 2.4 million Twitter followers.

This is interesting because it dovetails nicely with the idea that the Cowboys and Patriots also have the least popular teams when you ask the whole world what it thinks.

It's not as simple as just how many social media followers, of course. Then it would just be an easy list that didn't require an Emory education (or even a high school education) to figure out.

It's also not just as simple as being a good team. The Cowboys are a great example of this, and so are the Eagles, who rank very high (No. 5 overall) in the study.

The Eagles are the big surprise on the list. The Eagles are also a good example of how the analysis works. Most fan rankings are based on subjective judgments and lack controls for short-term winning rates. This latter point is a critical shortcoming. It's easy to be supportive of a winning team. While Eagles fans might not be happy they are supportive in the face of mediocrity. Last year the Eagles struggled on the field but fans still paid premium prices and filled the stadium.

So even though the Eagles stink, people still support them and are willing to pay up in order to support them.

On the other end of the fan spectrum are a few names you would expect: the Bills and Rams make sense as teams without a strong level of support. They haven't been good in a while. The Jaguars are a team on the rise, but it's not surprising to see them at the bottom of the list, especially if raw numbers come into play. The study is supposed to account for controlling factors including market size, but it's tough to completely strip that out.

The Jaguars filling just 91 percent of their possible capacity while having an average ticket price of $57 hurt them badly.

One team that's a real surprise at the bottom are the Raiders, long known as one of the more rabid and insane fanbases in all of football. They check in at No. 31 overall, even after an impressive 2015 season.

It's possible relocation issues, as well long-term struggles for the franchise on the field, cause the Raiders to fall. If they're not filling up the stands despite having cheap(er) tickets and fans aren't coughing up to see a team from Oakland play on the East Coast -- which is pretty understandable -- it's going to ding them.