Determining the best states for sports fans seems like a daunting task.
Fifty states, 50 fan bases, endless possibilities, right?
A new study produced a diverse top 10 that includes most of the usual suspects along with some you might not expect to be so high.
Among the former group are No. 1 California followed by No. 2 Ohio. Texas is No. 4 with Pennsylvania fifth and Michigan seventh.
Those are all states with lots of people, lots of pro sports teams and passionate fans of college sports that have winning traditions.
They don’t have the market cornered, though. Kansas came in No. 3 with Iowa sixth and Connecticut ninth. Both Dakotas also made the top 10 with North Dakota at 8 and South Dakota two spots later.
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Two of the bottom 10 are also unexpected: No. 44 Arizona and No. 45 Georgia, two growing states with solid representation at multiple levels of sports. .
But size isn’t everything in this study, and neither is having the most pro or college teams.
How did they come up with this list?
Ticket-Compare ranked states using seven categories: Professional teams (NFL, NBA, MLB, NFL, MLS) within a 200-mile radius of a state’s population center, professional championships, NCAA championships, Division 1 colleges, share of high school students who play sports, sports-related college degrees and concentration of jobs in the sports industry.
They used a Z-score distribution to scale each metric relative to the mean across all 50 states and Washington, D.C., and capped outliers at +/-3. A state’s overall ranking was calculated using its average Z-score across all of the data points.
Digging deeper
California dominated the study in just about every way, though that is not surprising considering the size of the state’s population and number of pro sports teams and colleges in the state.
Success is also a factor, and Los Angeles has the most championships (eight) with San Francisco tied for second with five (Boston also had five) over the past 10 years.
California also has 26 Division I colleges, 29 college championships (all-time) and 18 professional teams.
Maybe the most surprising ranking is Florida. The Sunshine State ranked 26th, right between No. 25 Arkansas and No. 27 Delaware.
Florida has 11 pro sports teams within 200 miles of population centers, but it was held back by a low percentage of high school sports participants (28.7%).
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Meanwhile, the state of New York came in 15th despite 18 pro teams.
The city of New York also has only one championship in the last 10 years — one less than Columbus, Ohio, which has only Ohio State athletics and the two pro franchises competing for it.
New York was held back by having one of the lowest concentrations of sports-related jobs in the country (126 per 100,000 workers).
That metric helped Kansas (351 jobs per 100,00), Ohio (338), North Dakota (329) and South Dakota (285) make the top 10.
North Dakota also had the second highest concentration of high school sports participants (76.5%), trailing only Iowa (81.3%).
Who is Ticket-Compare?
The site describes itself as a source for fans to find the best prices for tickets.
It does that by helping fans compare tickets for sports and other events across pre-vetted secondary marketplaces and official hospitality sellers.
