Then moving south, the South Dakota State Jackrabbits maybe?
True, but the Ducks are overwhelmingly more popular, because almost all Oregon sports fans who didn’t attend either of the major universities support them. The Blazers are very popular in the Portland metro area, but not so much in the rest of the State.
West Virginia would probably be WVU Football, I guess? The WVU Basketball team would be a distant second.
Or is Marshall a bigger deal than I think it is?
In Saskatchewan (Canada), the Roughriders CFL team is definitely the biggest sports team around.
I’m an outsider (parent of an out-of-state student) but my observation over four years is that when the Bulldogs lose it’s like a death in the family (except for Tech fans, of course). They don’t feel like that about the Falcons or the Braves. It’s not just people who went to UGA. Kids all over the state are raised to be Bulldogs fans. If there’s a place in Georgia where you‘re more than 20 feet from their “G” logo I’ve yet to see it. I’ve lost count of the number of kids I’ve met who said “All I ever wanted to be was a Georgia Bulldog, sir.”
I’m from Boston, one of the most rabid fanbases in the US. The Dawgs got us beat by a mile.
While I agree with you for large parts of the state, that’s not necessarily the case in Atlanta. Atlanta is a transplant city, so many residents grew up elsewhere. In Atlanta there are a LOT of Falcons and Braves fans, while their college fandom is often from widely disparate parts of the country. The Braves might only get just over a third of the attendance of a Bulldog home game, but they play 75 games at home, as opposed to the 6 or 7 of UGa.
I have friends in Atlanta working at Coca Cola, Home Depot, Delta and UPS.
They all have “department days out” (name varies of course) at Braves games. Fewer than 25% of people take up the offer. Here in Boston the events are filled up immediately at my company. We only have a few hundred corporate employees in total and 50 seats go in literally five minutes after the announcement goes out. At Coca Cola HQ, with thousands of employees they struggle to give away 100 tickets. And many people take the tickets and don’t show up. If you did that at our company, you’d get a frosty reception the next day from your colleagues.
I lived in Atlanta during the run of 11 division championships. No one seemed to care. People got excited when the Falcons went to the Super Bowl, but that was literally the only year I went to a playoff football viewing party.
College football viewing parties happened every single week. Sometimes four or five on our street. Georgia, Georgia Tech, Alabama, Florida, Tennessee. And we lived in a neighborhood that was comfortably 50% transplants from outside the south (probably 25% outside the country).
Over 70,000 go to each football game and around 35,000 go to each of their 75 baseball games. Their baseball team has the fifth highest attendance in the league.
This just reinforces my point. Yes, there are plenty of Georgia fans, but there are also a shit-ton of Auburn fans, Ohio State fans, Alabama fans, Virginia Tech fans, Notre Dame fans, Michigan fans, Oklahoma fans, etc. I just don’t think Atlanta has any single dominant franchise, nothing like a Nebraska, for instance, and Atlanta is more than half of Georgia.
For Wyoming the main team is probably the UW football team, the Cowboys. For a citation, please consult the nearest Wyoming license plate.
It will be nice to be corrected by someone that actually knows, as happened with North Dakotia. Fans of the ice hocky team, now named the UNDies, not only support the team at home in the arena known as Da Ralph, but on the road. When the UNDies come to play the University of Denver in hockey there are frequently more Sewage in the stands than DU fans.
To be fair, the “Bucking Horse and Rider” logo, which the University of Wyoming uses as their logo, and which appears on the state’s license plates, is a registered trademark owned by the state of Wyoming itself. It is frequently used to identify the state as a whole, not just the university’s sports teams.
Back when Nebraska was still in the Big 8/Big 12, this happened frequently at the University of Kansas football games. Nebraska was good, and Kansas generally wasn’t. NU home games were sold out, so a large number of Cornhusker fans drove a couple of hundred miles to Lawrence to watch Nebraska pound the Jayhawks.
So it was sweet for me, as a Jayhawk fan, to be in the stands in 2007 when KU defeated Nebraska 76-39.
I lived in San Diego in the 80s and went to a Chargers/Raiders game once. The Raiders were in Los Angeles at the time. The Chargers were terrible and the Raiders great at the time and had a rabid fan base. It was probably at least 60% Raiders fans and fights galore in the stands.
Sorry, looks like my experience in the 1990s is not representative of the state of pro sports in Atlanta now.
It’s quite alright. I wasn’t there in the 90s, moving there in the early aughts, so my lens is biased as well. The 90s was the start of its growth spurt, when a lot of transplants started showing up.
But how many people watch the TV broadcasts?
Last week over 21 million watched the Falcons and Minnesota. As for baseball, I have no clue as that is hugely variable.
Is there a question behind that question, or was it just curiosity?
My thinking was that TV ratings are a better indicator of interest in a team these days than attendence at the ball park/stadium.
Possibly, but then you have to account for the viewership within the market, as the other team is contributing heavily to those numbers.
I don’t think I care that much about the details (I’m not a fan of the Falcons, the Braves , nor the Bulldogs), but I just don’t feel that Georgia is single sports franchise dominant in a way that a state like Nebraska is.
I agree, major cities like Atlanta are sure to have multiple sports teams that all share the public interests. I think any state that qualifies will need to have most one major (NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL) team.
Which means we’re limited to the following:
States with no major teams:
- Alaska, Alabama, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia, Wyoming
States with one major team:
- Wisconsin: Green Bay Packers (NFL)
- Oklahoma: Oklahoma Thunder (NBA)
- Oregon: Portland Trailblazers (NBA)
- Utah: Utah Jazz (NBA)
If you count MLS, Oregon and Utah have 2 teams.
The Milwaukee Brewers and Milwaukee Bucks would like to have a word with you. 
Also:
Utah now has an NHL team, the Mammoth; they essentially took over the assets of the now-defunct Phoenix Coyotes, and are considered an expansion team. This will be their second season, after playing last year as the “Utah Hockey Club.”