Redditor determines which NFL teams have more fans than population of namesake
We're deep into the NFL offseason, which means fans have plenty of time on their hands to dive into projects that might seem frivolous when there's actual football to watch.
And now we have what might be the quintessential NFL offseason project, courtesy of Reddit user TwentyThreeEightyOne, who was inspired by the recent suggestion that there are more bears on the planet than Chicago Bears fans and attempted to determine which NFL teams have more fans than the global population of their namesake.
The post on Reddit is is absurdly in-depth, but here are some highlights:
Panthers: There are roughly 7,034,101 Panthers fans. "Panther" is kind of a loosely defined term, but the genus Panthera includes tigers (3,890 worldwide), lions (20,000), jaguars (15,000), leopards (250,000), and snow leopards (6,000). That adds up to 294,890. There are more Panthers fans than panthers. ...
Jets: There are roughly 5,824,758 Jets fans. Apparently, there are about 20,000 commercial airplanes in the world. A lot of those are not jets, but there are also a bunch of private jets. Either way, there's no way the number of jets is in the millions. There are more Jets fans than jets. ...
Colts: There are roughly 6,689,254 Colts fans. A Colt is a male horse under the age of four. There are 58,000,000 horses in the world. The lifespan of a horse in the wild is about 15-20 years (we'll take an average of 17.5 years) and I do not feel like doing in-depth research into the horse industry so I'm just going to assume that the 58,000,000 horses are distributed evenly by sex and age. That would mean 29,000,000 male horses, of which about 6,628,571 would be under the age of four. This is ridiculously close, but using my obviously extremely accurate numbers it looks like there are more Colts fans than colts! ...
Chargers: There are roughly 4,700,430 Chargers fans. The Los Angeles Chargers don't seem to have been named after an actual thing, so I'll improvise. I own several chargers. So does everyone I know. Considering how ubiquitous electronic devices are, there have to be billions of chargers. There are more chargers than Chargers fans.