The current college football season is well underway, and no sports season is complete without some friendly smack talk. However, the popularity of college football teams isn’t just measured by touchdowns and championship titles anymore.
Social media platforms like TikTok have become a new arena for fans to express their support for their favorite teams, especially through posts on popular hashtags.
While you were busy double-tapping every post or commenting to stay on your team’s side of TikTok, we set out to discover which teams have everyone’s attention.
The Most Popular College Football Teams
Scroll Tide! It’s no surprise that the Alabama Crimson Tide, with 16 NCAA football titles, amasses a huge fanbase on TikTok. With a staggering 1 billion views, ’Bama fans come in at the top spot on the list of most viewed college football teams according to TikTok.
Maybe it’s because of #BamaRushTok that Alabama outperforms their rivals, the Auburn Tigers, by nearly 1000% on TikTok. Auburn comes in at #12 with just over 100 million views. It may take another War Eagle to close that gap. Both teams hail from the state of Alabama and the NCAA Southeastern Conference (SEC), which also happens to be the conference with the highest number of average views per conference team (192.2 million).
Lions, bears, and tigers again! The LSU Tigers, another SEC team with an Alabama rivalry, took the second spot with 660.5 million TikTok views. Right behind them are the Ohio State Buckeyes in third with 527.3 million views. Ohio State plays in the Big Ten Conference, and when analyzing the most popular conferences, the Big Ten came out as the second most popular with 76.7 million average views per team. Their rivals, the Michigan Wolverines, did not make the cut for the top 15 despite having the most all-time wins in the NCAA. That kick is no good!
Since the cat people have a couple of tigers to choose from, this one is for the dog lovers! The SEC’s Georgia Bulldogs, back-to-back reigning champs, place at #4 with just over 400 million TikTok views. UGA won the 2022 championship over Alabama, then proceeded to go undefeated in 2023, capping off the season with a dominant 65-7 win over TCU for the title.
The TCU Horned Frogs are eighth in TikTok views with 185.6 million as they are looking to swipe back up to the championship this year. They come from the Big 12 Conference, the fourth most popular conference with 36.7 million average TikTok views per Big 12 team.
Clicking “follow” on the West Coast’s Pac-12 Conference, its 44.1 million average conference team views mark it as the third most popular conference. Two of the conference’s most prominent rivals, the USC Trojans and the UCLA Bruins, also battle it out in the top 15. At #7 with 188.8 million TikTok views, the Trojans top the Bruins, whose 103.5 million views earn them the #11 spot.
Deion Sanders can never be left out of the conversation. Squeezing into the list at #15 with 63.8 million TikTok views are the Colorado Buffaloes. Although the team has played in the Big 12 before –– and plans to return to the conference next year –– they are in the Pac-12 this season. Coach Prime is the only player to compete in a World Series and a Super Bowl, so it’s no surprise he has generated a lot of buzz for the Buffaloes after becoming head coach and immediately pumping out wins. Only time will tell how he will do this season, and we guess you could say, “tick tock.”
Closing Thoughts
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Methodology
In order to identify the most popular college football teams in the U.S., we looked at the popularity of the associated TikTok hashtag (i.e. #AlabamaFootball or #LSUFootball) across NCAA Division 1 football teams. We recorded the number of views on videos under that hashtag and compared trends across schools.
We also looked into the most popular conferences and states, based on the average number of views per team in the conference or state. This was done in order to reduce bias associated with states or conferences with more or fewer teams.
