Playground →
The top 10 splits into two distinct neighborhoods: a tight cluster of college football journalists and publishers at the high end, and a secondary band of college-sports-adjacent media that pulls the shape toward a broader sports-media orbit.
The shape is two-peak. The Athletic CFB leads at 0.87, followed immediately by Stewart Mandel at 0.86 — the two strongest signals and the clearest first peak. Pat Forde (0.83), Pete Thamel (0.82), Holly Rowe (0.82), Bruce Feldman (0.81), and Brett McMurphy (0.81) extend that first cluster — all Journalists by subcategory, all college-football-focused by context. That's six of the top seven neighbors sharing the Journalists subcategory, with The Athletic CFB as the lone News Publisher in that group. The first peak is essentially a college football press corps.
The second peak is structurally different. Banner Society (0.80, News Publisher) and Joe Schad (0.80, Journalist) sit at the hinge, followed by Jay Bilas at 0.80 — a Journalist whose primary association is college basketball rather than football. That last entry is the tell: the second neighborhood isn't purely college football coverage, it's the wider college sports media ecosystem, where basketball journalists and multi-sport publishers share enough audience composition to register as near neighbors.
The two-peak structure reveals an audience that is anchored in dedicated CFB coverage but extends meaningfully into the broader college sports press — not a niche readership locked to one beat, but one that tracks the full landscape of college athletics journalism.
