With the lockout finally ending recently, and the Hall of Fame Game days away, football is clearly back. With September just around the corner, America gets ready for one of its favorite activities: Fantasy Football.
Given my tendency to participate in two or three leagues per season, I am always on top of the trends and analysis of players in order to find the mid-round talent that will propel my roster, and the legions of similar minded people have led to massive popularity for any website that provides quality fantasy football information, such as Walter Football.
While we at Chitika do not claim to be experts of fantasy football, we do claim to know a great deal about the world of search, given our search-targeted ad technology. Because of this, Chitika Insights decided to take a somewhat unique look at the world of fantasy sports: see what the web is searching for. For part one of our “Search Draft”, Chitika Insights took a look at the Quarterbacks being searched for within our network. What we found was, Chicago residents are good at causing some bizarre results:
At the top of this list are some of our QB mainstays: Mike Vick, Tom Brady, Ben Roethlisberger, and Peyton Manning are all expected to go, and go early, in all fantasy football drafts. However, our winner among starting NFL Quarterbacks is an odd one, given Jay Cutler is not even considered a top 10 fantasy option by many outlets (including the aforementioned Walter Football, NFL.com, and ESPN). Also interestingly, Aaron Rodgers falls down to near Donovan McNabb status in search interest, despite being a near-unanimous top three fantasy Quarterback, and reigning Super Bowl MVP. This alludes to exactly what we know about Packer fans: smaller in size, but huge in passion. Also of note is the popularity of Tony Romo, despite being another fringe starter in a twelve team league.
The biggest note of all, however, is the “Tebow effect” of search. Take a look at this list of current and former Denver Broncos Quarterbacks:
Despite not even being listed as the current starter, Tebow maintains a huge amount of popularity, exceeding every other QB by an almost two-to-one ratio, and has nearly triple the search traffic as 2010 NFL MVP Tom Brady. Because of this, current Bronco starter Kyle Orton also sees an uptick in popularity, putting his search traffic in the same neighborhood as the aforementioned Tony Romo. Due to neither being confirmed as starters once the season starts, I omitted both from my rankings.
As shown by our results, while team and player popularity (or infamy) can affect results, the best usually rise to the top in the form of players like Vick and Brady. On Thursday, we will publish Part 2 of our listings, the Running Backs.
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