By Mike Ozanian
Forbes.com
The champion Green Bay Packers have the most passionate fans in the National Football League.
The team that creates the least excitement? The New York Jets.
How do we know this? Take a look at the table below.
It compares the popularity (national and local television ratings, traffic the teams' offical websites draw and how many times they were mentioned on the Internet) of each team with its metro area population (the New York teams had their metro areas cut in half for this calculation because they share the same market, as did the Oakland and San Francisco teams for the same reason). Both the popularity and metro areas were indexed with 100 representing the largest figure, and then the popularity index was divided by the metro index. The higher the ratio, the more rabid a team's fan base.
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The popularity figures come courtesy of a Wall Street Journal article that was published long before the Packers won their fourth Super Bowl. But like the Pittsburgh Steelers, the only team with six Lombardi Trophies, the Packers are a national brand despite playing in small market. The Dallas Cowboys are the most popular team in the league (note score of 100), but are ranked 14 overall as a result of playing in the third largest market.
The top 10:
1. Green Bay Packers
