So I calculate something called a Viewership Score. There's a bunch of math behind it, but it's basically meant to assess TV exposure of various teams and how well a team is drawing fans. There's some methodology to it (which I'll explain below for those who really want to delve into it), but it's worth noting that BYU is doing fantastically in it this year.
If we remove SEC/B1G teams (or future ones), this year's V-Score rankings look like this
Team: Score (Overall Rank with B1G/SEC included)
- Notre Dame: 4.29 (2)
- Clemson: 3.32 (5)
- Florida St: 2.90 (11)
- Oregon: 2.25 (16)
- Pitt: 1.90 (20)
- NC State: 1.84 (21)
- Georgia Tech: 1.79 (22)
- Washington St: 1.77 (23)
- Wake Forest: 1.62 (24)
- BYU: 1.54 (27)
That puts BYU ahead of (among others) Miami, Iowa, West Virginia, Michigan St, North Carolina, Ole Miss, Oklahoma St, Washington and (of course) UCLA. That's honestly pretty impressive, especially given our West Coast location. Here's all the Western US schools (considered anyone west of 98°35′W, which split the contiguous US in half geographically and just misses Texas, Oklahoma, Oklahoma St and a few others)
Team: Score (Overall Rank with B1G/SEC included)
- Oregon: 2.25 (16)
- Washington St: 1.77 (23)
- USC: 1.59 (25)
- BYU: 1.54 (27)
- Utah: 1.07 (40) - would be #18 among non B1G/SEC schools in case you're wondering, so there's a sizable gap between BYU and Utah at this point for 2022 viewership
- Washington: 1.03 (44)
- Cal: 0.97 (45)
- Stanford: 0.97 (46)
- Arizona St: 0.90 (47)
- Texas Tech: 0.82 (50)
- Colorado: 0.67 (53)
- Fresno St: 0.60 (54) - to put it another way, the current gap between BYU and Utah is the same as the gap between Utah and Fresno
- UCLA: 0.57 (55)
- Boise St: 0.43 (62)
- Oregon St: 0.42 (63)
- San Diego St: 0.38 (65)
- Arizona: 0.37 (67)
- UNLV: 0.00 (T73) - no widely televised games
- UTSA: 0.00 (T73) - no widely televised games
***Methodology***
First off, an important disclaimer: Rather than try and control for every viewing window and channel, I think it's important to realize that networks are choosing who they want to spotlight. And they're not doing it out of malice or to hold anyone down, but because they want the best ratings. So I don't put a lot of stock in the "If we were on FOX at noon every week we'd have better ratings" argument... because there's a reason most schools don't get that slot. So I'm generally less receptive than I used to be to arguments about timeslots and channels. If you're continually on FS1 or ESPNU, it's probably not a great sign for your brand.
Now to the details:
V-Score is calculated pretty simply.
1. Taking all regular season games (no bowls or conference championship games)
2. I find both the average and median of all widely televised showings (ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, ESPN, ESPN2, FS1),
3. Then take the harmonic mean of those two.
This is to prevent huge splash viewership from skewing things too much. If Tulane plays 5 games getting 200k viewers each, and then 1 game against Alabama getting 5 M, their average viewership would be 1M. So instead we take the harmonic mean (2*x1*x2)/(x1+x2) which punishes weakness in either category
This still leaves one issue unaccounted for... thus far we've only looked at widely televised showings. So if a school only gets one game on TV (against Alabama) and is never otherwise shown, both the median and average would be very high. Step 4 accounts for this.
4. Take the harmonic mean of that number with the average of ALL games regular season games, with other games being treated as 0 viewership
Basically, any game not on a widely televised network is treated as having zero viewers (which obviously isn't completely accurate - whether it's a regional network in the ACC, or PAC12 network or SECN, or BYUtv, there are people watching. But these games are less available and often don't even have viewership numbers available, so they just get treated as zeros). This means that the total average is basically ALWAYS going to be less than widely televised number we got in step 3, and greatly hurts those schools who are not having their games put across major channels on a regular basis, while rewarding those who do get a chance to be shown. If we're talking exposure, the game actually being readily available is a huge part of it.