Which NFL Team Is Really “America’s Team?”

From Ted Williams Head

The Dallas Cowboys have self-anointed themselves “America’s Team.” The proclamation was made in a 1978 Dallas Cowboys highlight film when the narrator said:

They appear on television so often that their faces are as familiar to the public as presidents and movie stars. They are the Dallas Cowboys, “America’s Team.”

30 years later, Cowboys fans are still boasting about being “America’s Team,” but are they really? What about the Pittsburgh Steelers, Green Bay Packers, and the New York Giants?

From the Wall Street Journal:

In a first-of-its-kind study performed this summer, Nielsen Co., the media-research firm, developed a system for ranking the popularity of NFL teams based on each team’s local and national TV rankings, how often they’re mentioned on the Internet and how many visitors they attract to their official websites. The report, dubbed the Nielsen Sports Media Exposure Index, is the company’s first attempt to classify pro-football teams in this manner.

The Nielsen report uses one year of data, but separate research from the past two decades has shown similar results. Harris Interactive, a New York market-research firm, has been asking respondents to name their favorite NFL team annually since 1992. The Cowboys came out No. 1 on 11 occasions in that poll and were never lower than No. 4. The Rams, since they moved to St. Louis in 1995, were in the bottom five on five occasions. The only teams that fared worse than the Rams were the Bengals and the Jaguars. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers finished next-to-last in the Nielsen study.

So it appears that the Dallas Cowboys are indeed “America’s Team.” The Cowboys did have help from the NFL, who gave the Cowboys a league-leading six national appearances, which equates to a colossal 117 million viewers. But it’s not just television where the Cowboys are getting all of their exposure. Dallas was helped in the study by the immense amount of traffic their website draws—nearly 50% more monthly unique visitors than the second-place Steelers. Overall the Dallas Cowboys were an astounding 23% more popular than the the No. 2 team, the Pittsburgh Steelers. The New York Giants were the third most popular team, followed by three of the four teams in the NFC’s North division: the Chicago Bears, the Green Bay Packers and the Minnesota Vikings.

It appears that Cowboys fans can legitimately call their team, “America’s Team.”