Welcome to The Holy Land of Hoops

Just perused the google analytics data for the Holy Land site for the first time in a long time. A couple of interesting tidbits which I relayed on twitter but thought the rest of you might find interesting as well.

Top 5 cities in terms of visitors: Omaha, Cincy, NYC, Dayton, Chicago

Logical that Omaha & Cincy users frequent the site most considering their fans excitement over joining the #BigEast but 2 questions:
1) why aren't Butler / Indianapolis fans as participatory as the Creighton and Xavier fans? Indy is 31st in number of visitors.
2) why is Dayton the 4th most active?

FWIW- 3 schools thought of as possible #BigEast additions, in terms of board traffic: Dayton is 4, STL 18, Richmond 48

My thoughts:
1) Xavier fans extremely excited about our new league.
2) Butler fans still recovering from Brad Stevens leaving for the Celtics.
3) Dayton fans want in the Big East so badly they can taste it.

Speaking on behalf of Omaha, we're excited. Really, really, excited. Some of us should be pitied, in fact. We've cut off contact with family members who refuse to join in discussions about the Jays and the Big East.

Kinda surprised STL is so low.

The biggest SLU poster on here is from Louisville, so that has something to do with it I would assume.

Darn... you have uncovered my diabolic plan to make Louisville the number one visiting city of the Holyland...

really its not all that surprising. A lot of the school fan bases that frequent this site have alumni that scatter across the country. The Dayton thing is surprising. There can't be that many people in Dayton and there really never were very many Dayton posters on here.

Omaha is #1!!! I come here alot and I don't even live in Omaha. I'm not too surprised by the low level of Butler participants. I've gone to their message boards and it's usually pretty dead (maybe I go to the wrong ones?) or maybe they just don't know about this site...

Indy is likely so low because of the strong presence of IU in the area. Butler definitely plays second fiddle to the hoosiers in terms of newspaper coverage (Indy Star) as well as local tv. For awhile Butler was kind of viewed as a cute little story whenever they dd well but IU was the main attraction. That's beginning to change but I doubt Butler will ever reach IU levels of popularity in the city especially when they play each other. That being said, Butler fan presence online is lacking when compared to other BE schools. Hopefully that changes as well with the move to a higher profile league.

Bill, I can tell you from personal experience, never underestimate the rabid Flyer fan base.

Some of the St. Louis views are from a butler fan.

I think some of the lack of Indy participation is because a lot of message board posts are either trying to steer the conversation toward how awesome "my school" is or why "your school" isn't all that great in comparison. Having spent forever in the Horizon League, a lot of us Butler fans are still sitting back and trying to figure out how to interact with fans of other good teams without it turning into a pissing contest.

As for our boards, they're usually pretty quiet during the summer. They'll pick up again soon enough.

Among SLU fans, the topic doesn't come up much anymore. In fact, most of the time it does come up it quickly goes away.

We'll serve our sentence and get ready for the future.