From the National Football Foundation 2017-2018 Report:

“Amazing College Football Popularity Highlighted by Impressive Ratings and Attendance Data”

College football ranks as the nation’s second most popular sport with TV games reaching more than 200 million unique fans and 47.6 million fans actually attending games in 2017.

Fifty-six percent of US adults cited themselves as college football fans in a recent Gallup Poll – which is more than professional baseball, basketball, hockey and soccer.

Close to half of those citing themselves as college football fans are women.

For the past college football season, nearly half the total viewers were female (about 77.5 million), about 28.7 million were Millennials ages 18-34 and 71.9 million were between the ages of 35 and 64 (which is nearly 60% of that demographics’ population).

From an ethnicity standpoint, college football reaches about 23.5 million African-Americans and about 15 million Hispanics—that represents nearly 60% of all African-American viewers and nearly 30% of all Hispanic viewers.

To illustrate the appeal of college football, USC attracted an average of 72,683 fans to its home games during 2017.  At their Sept. 16, 2017 game against Texas, the USC crowd of 84,714 eclipsed the crowds for the LA Rams (56,612) and the LA Chargers (25,381) – combined.

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College football fans are 20% more likely to be Republican than Democrat, and are 7% more likely to donate to religious causes.

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The percentage of viewership increases as household income increases, and as the level of education increases.