Where did October and November go?  As we suddenly find ourselves staring at the end of the college football season with the final weekend coming up, those of us die-hard sports fans can take solace in the fact that the college hoops season is well underway.  From my perspective as a burnt orange bleeding Texas fan, anything that helps find a small ray of sunshine in the cloudy skies of the BCS is a welcome distraction.

Whatever the case, now that we’re a few weeks into the basketball season and have already seen several holiday tournaments come and go, I thought it would be a good time to check in with the FanSection college basketball applications to see if we can get a sense of which fans are turning their attention to hoops and which are continuing to focus on the gridiron.  The first indication is how the FanSection application rankings compare to this week’s Associated Press rankings.  The side-by-side comparison of each Top 10 list is below:

The FanSection community rankings were determined by the increase in membership for the month of November 2008.  The list differs substantially from the AP rankings with only North Carolina, Duke, and Tennessee appearing on both lists.  Scrolling through the FanSection rankings and it’s easy to see a couple of similar attributes.  First, these are all schools with a proud basketball tradition, so fans are obviously getting geared up for the meat of the season.  Second, these are all schools that have had poor to mediocre football seasons, with all of them suffering major setbacks in November.  Coincidence that these fans are now jumping on the basketball bandwagon?  Maybe, but there has to be some truth there as the only football schools on the AP list that have had good to great seasons (Pittsburgh, Oklahoma, and Texas), aren’t on the FanSection rankings list despite having large, passionate fan and alumni bases across the country.  It will be interesting to revisit both lists after the bowl season has completed and fans are able to devote more time to basketball.

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