National Website Ranks Evansville at the Bottom of College Basketball Cities For Fans

Well, this figures. Evansville is the Rodney Dangerfield of American cities. And we didn't get any respect from a recent article from the personal finance magazine Wallethub either. They decided to rate 291 US cities that have division one college basketball teams to determine the best for college basketball fans.. They used nine different sets of statistics to decide that  out of those 291 cities, Evansville ranked 284th.

We did manage to edge out cities like Pocatello, Idaho and St. George, Utah (yes they both have division one college programs). But according to Wallethub there are only seven cities below Evansville. And it's a long way up to the nation's top college basketball city--Durham North Carolina. Wallethub was not necessarily ranking the Universities or their basketball programs although the quality of those were used in the tabulations. According to wallethub.com, here are the nine metrics they used to find the best cities for fans :

• Number of College Basketball (Division 1) Teams: Full Weight (~12.50 Points)
• Performance Level of College Basketball (Division 1) Team(s): Full Weight (~12.50 Points)
  Note: This metric was calculated by dividing “Number of Wins” by “Total Games Played” and using the past three seasons’ averages.
• Number of Basketball (Division 1) Championship Wins: Full Weight (~12.50 Points)
• Number of College Basketball (Division 1) Conference Regular Season Championship Wins: Half Weight (~6.25 Points)
• Number of Hall of Fame Head Coaches: Full Weight (~12.50 Points)
• Minimum Season Ticket Price for a College Basketball (Division 1) Game: Full Weight (~12.50 Points)
• College-Basketball Fans Engagement: Sesqui-Weight (~18.75 Points)
  Note: This metric was calculated by adding “Number of Twitter Followers” and “Number of Facebook ‘Likes’ per Capita.”
• Number of Coaches in Past 10 Seasons: Half Weight (~6.25 Points)
  Note: “Past 10 Seasons” include seasons 2010–2012 to 2020–2021.
• College-Basketball Stadium Capacity: Half Weight (~6.25 Points)
  Note: This metric was calculated by dividing “Stadium Capacity” by “City Population.”

Sources: Data used to create these rankings were collected from the U.S. Census Bureau, ESPN, Sports Reference, NCAA.org, each team’s website and social media accounts.

The top 10 best cities for basketball fans are:

1. Durham, NC, 2 Lexington, KY, 3 East Lansing ,MI, 4 Lawrence, KS, 5 Storrs, CT, 6 Los Angles, CA, 7. Chapel Hill, NC, 8 Philadelphia, PA, 9 Fayette, MS, 10 Kingston, RI

and who do you think is the nation's highest paid basketball coach?

Yep. It's not even close. UK's John Calipari makes 8.2 million. The University President and the Kentucky Governor make a million combined.

There is a lot of basketball info in the article that you can check out here