Touchdowns to Terabytes: Looking Back on This Season of College Football — Broken Down by Selfies

All season, football fans flocked to stadiums across the country with their smartphones in hand – ready to share all the action. From the rivalries, tailgates, close finishes and stunning upsets, no sport is more thrilling from one week to the next. And the data speaks for itself.

Last night’s thrilling championship game was a close call with Alabama bringing home the trophy in overtime. Fans used nearly 2.5 terabytes (TB) of data during college football’s biggest game. That’s equal to more than 7.1 million selfies from the stands.

To settle the score, we tracked the data used at the University of Alabama and University of Georgia home games during the regular season. Based on mobile data usage alone, Alabama fans would celebrate as the data champions using an average of 1.4 TB per game. Georgia fans weren’t far behind, using over 1.2 TB of data on average.

Here’s a throwback: You’d need 728,177 floppy disks to store a TB of information.

Like many teams this season, fans set their own records. This includes the amount of data used on game day at stadiums across the country. Let’s look back at how the data stacked up on our in-stadium mobile networks.

College Football Final Scoreboard: Fast Facts

• There were nearly 600 college football regular season games played across different venues where we provide in-venue coverage via Distributed Antenna Systems (DAS).*
• The top 10 stadiums where fans used the most data are home to winning teams.
• 60% of the teams were ranked in the final top 25 of the regular season, including South Carolina as the top-ranked team in the country.
• Which college football game resulted in the most mobile usage? On Nov. 11 in College Station, Texas, the crowd shared their game day experiences on their phones using nearly 4 TB of data. That equals more than 11.4 million stadium selfies. That’s a lot of selfies—and even more team spirit.
• If regular season mobile data usage determined the outcome of the college football championship, College Station would bring home the big win.
• In total, our customers used nearly 300 terabytes of mobile data on our in-venue cellular networks during the 2017 regular season – a 43% boost from the 2016 season.**

*Data metrics come only from venues with a DAS where the AT&T mobile network is on-air. These metrics aren’t comprehensive of every game played during this season for college or football.

**Figures only include data traffic from AT&T customers on the AT&T venue-specific mobile network.