I am getting ready for a trip to Boston for the holidays and given New England’s recent spate of good luck, I feel the need to brush up on some sports news. I can’t compete on actual knowledge of football so I thought I’d dig up some Hitwise stats to impress my friends. The most interesting thing I came across was that websites for the Dallas Cowboys, Washington Redskins, Pittsburgh Steelers and Chicago Bears all beat the yet to be defeated New England Patriots in share of US Internet visits. The Patriots and Steelers are playing in a different conference than the Cowboys of the Bears, but given the level of enthusiasm in Boston (and across New England) for their team’s prospects I was surprised at this ranking.
Nor is this new. Every week for the past year (and for most of the past two years) US Internet visits to the Dallas Cowboys website have far outstripped other team websites. Last week, the Dallas Cowboys website received a 5x larger share of US Internet visits compared with the Patriots. And for most of the past 52-weeks, the websites for the Steelers, Bears and Philadelphia Eagles received a larger share of US Internet visits compared with the Patriots.

It will come as no surprise that the biggest chunk (one third) of traffic to the Dallas Cowboys website comes from Texas and 23% of visits to the Patriots’ website is from Massachusetts. Texas is a much more populous state than Massachusetts so the difference in share of US Internet visits to the websites seems to come down largely to the size of the local fan base. But this doesn’t explain why Washington’s teams should draw a larger share of visits.
Each of these team websites receive between 14% and 22% of their US internet visits from the NFL website. The Patriots is most reliant on NFL traffic, at 22%. The Dallas Cowboys is least reliant, at 14%. However, for all these team websites, the top source of traffic last week was NFL.com.
In US Internet searches the Dallas Cowboys win again. The term “new england patriots” has been gaining recently, as the following chart illustrates. It seems the difference in visits can be attributed mostly to population size and search volume – indicating a more active and larger fan base.

A Search Term Suggestion report reveals that when US Internet users are looking for the Patriots, they are looking for the schedule, Tom Brady, tickets and recently, “colts-patriots”. In searching for Tom Brady, searches for his jersey, biography, pictures and information on his relationship and baby dominate.
Other interesting data points I came across…
* Last week, share of US Internet visits to Football websites is up 12% year on year and up 29% over the past two years.
* Among the top 5 team websites, the Redskins was the only team showing an increase in share of US Internet visits, with visits up 89% year on year.
I still can’t talk stats on players and teams, but at least now I can hold my own with some stats of my own!