There’s a Tampa tie-in when it comes to Super Bowl LIII this Sunday (shout-out to Los Angeles Rams Director of College Scouting Brad Holmes, who is a Chamberlain High School graduate), but Bay area fans generally don’t have much to be happy about when it comes to their football teams.
The University of South Florida Bulls pretty much fizzled out after the team’s hot start, and our beloved NFL Buccaneers, well, never really recovered after that microdose of Fitz-magic ran out.
That’s why it’s not surprising to find the city ranked no. 23 overall in a new WalletHub poll of America’s Best Football Cities.
The financial website chose cities with at least one professional football team or at least one college football team and then grouped the cities by division — “Pro Football” and “College Football” — before assigning weights to each divisional category based on its popularity among fans. Among the criteria determining a city’s score: Division and Super Bowl championships, fan engagement, head coaches, stadium capacity, ticket price and more.
Tampa scored 34.76, which was good enough to be the 19th best large football city in the U.S. (by comparison, the top large city, Pittsburgh, scored 63.49).
The good news is that only one Florida city (Miami, which was no. 6 overall with a score of 48.25) ranked higher than Tampa Bay did. Coming in behind us were Jacksonville (31.91, no. 28 overall), Tallahassee (22.53, no. 35 overall), Orlando (16.75, no. 83 overall) and Daytona Beach (15.08, no. 130 overall).
Gainesville, home of the University of Florida Gators, ranked no. 131 with a score of just 15.06.
See a heat map below and then check out the full study via WalletHub.
This article appears in Jan 24-31, 2019.
