Notre Dame Gets Talked About All Summer. So Does Everybody Else.

In a dead June, Notre Dame draws 18,884 Wikipedia lookups. In a live October it draws 70,836. That is a floor of 27%. Across twelve blue bloods the median floor is 26.8%. Every program keeps the same share of its attention when nothing at all is happening.

The Sports Page · The Professor · measuring hype instead of asserting it

The question: every Notre Dame fan believes the Irish get talked about all year, however small the news. Are they right?

The answer: yes, and it is not special at all. In the dead months of March to June, Notre Dame holds 27% of the attention it gets from September to December. The median across twelve blue-blood programs is 26.8%. Notre Dame ranks seventh of twelve.

Here is the surprising part. How much attention a program gets varies a lot; Alabama’s in-season months run 2.6 times Nebraska’s. The shape hardly varies at all. Every ratio lands between 21% and 31%, and whether a program is big or small predicts nothing about it (r = +0.01).

What you get from it: a way to tell real distinctiveness from the ordinary feeling of caring a lot.

What we measured, and why this one

You cannot count hype. So we need a behaviour that stands in for it, and Wikipedia lookups are a good one; somebody had a thought about Notre Dame and went to read about it. Nobody looks a thing up by accident.

So take twelve programs, five and a half years of monthly pageviews, and split the calendar in two. September through December is the season. March through June is the dead zone. No games, no playoff, nothing but recruiting talk and spring practice.

Divide one by the other and you get a floor: the share of a program’s attention that survives having nothing to report.

Alabama is bigger. Nobody is shaped differently.

Look at the bars and the markers one at a time; they say opposite things.

The bars spread out: Alabama draws about 87,000 lookups in a median in-season month, Nebraska about 33,000. That is a real 2.6-fold gap, and it is roughly what you would guess.

Now look at where the marker sits inside each bar. It sits in the same place every time. Twenty-one percent at the low end, thirty-one at the high, and ten of the twelve between 25 and 29.

Notre Dame sits at 27%, which is the middle of the middle.

Why we expected otherwise

The belief starts from something true. Notre Dame does get covered in June, and you have seen it. What the belief adds, with no evidence, is the word only.

And we cannot see the comparison, because we do not spend our Junes reading about Nebraska. You notice your own team’s small news because you are the one reading it. Eleven other fan bases are having the same experience about their own club, and all of it is invisible to you.

What to take home: distinctiveness needs a comparison group

This is a mistake that goes well past football. A thing feels unusual, and we never gather the group it would have to be unusual against.

Your commute, your job, your family, your team’s die-hards. All of them feel unusual from the inside; most sit within a point or two of the middle.

So before you call a thing unusual, ask the dull question. Unusual next to whom, and did anybody count them?

The Almanac · A Milestone Observance

Every fiftieth issue of this newsletter is, by our own coinage, an “edition” in the same fake-Latin manner that the federal government has decreed 2026 the semiquincentennial of the Republic. This is The Sesquicentennial Edition. In observance, the Almanac looks back at what was actually happening at the five prior fifty-year marks of our national life.

• 1776(250 yrs ago) — The Continental Congress sat in Philadelphia, debating whether thirteen colonies could become anything at all. The vote that mattered came on July 2.
• 1826(200 yrs ago) — John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, the last surviving signers of the Declaration, both died on July 4 — fifty years to the day after independence. Adams's last words were reported to be “Jefferson still survives.” Jefferson had died five hours earlier.
• 1876(150 yrs ago) — The presidential election that fall was decided not at the ballot box but by a fifteen-member electoral commission. Samuel Tilden (D) won the popular vote. Rutherford B. Hayes (R) was awarded the White House in exchange for ending Reconstruction.
• 1926(100 yrs ago) — Harry Houdini died on Halloween of peritonitis from a ruptured appendix, a few days after being punched in the stomach by a college student.
• 1976(50 yrs ago) — Stevie Wonder released Songs in the Key of Life in September after two years of work. It debuted at #1.