Playground →
Six of Stewart Mandel's ten nearest neighbors are fellow Journalists — but the shape flag is two-peak, not a clean spike, because the top 10 splits into two distinct audience neighborhoods before it reaches the bottom.
The upper cluster is dense and homogeneous. Pete Thamel leads at 0.95, followed by Pat Forde at 0.93, Bruce Feldman at 0.93, Dan Wetzel at 0.92, and Brett McMurphy at 0.91 — all Journalists, all with scores compressed into a four-point band. The Athletic CFB, a News Publisher, sits at 0.92 inside that same cluster. These six neighbors form a recognizable college football journalism cohort, and their audience shapes are nearly interchangeable with Mandel's.
The second peak is structurally different. Banner Society (News Publisher, 0.88) and The Masters (Sporting Event, 0.88) arrive together, followed by basketball journalist Jeff Goodman at 0.87 and TV Personality Sam Ponder at 0.87. This group is more varied by subcategory — a golf major, a college football satire outlet, a basketball reporter, and a sideline host — suggesting a secondary audience neighborhood that extends beyond CFB journalism into broader sports-media consumption.
The two-peak structure reveals an audience that is anchored in college football reporting but carries enough overlap with general sports media that it bridges into golf, basketball, and sports television as well.
