Playground →
Seven of the top 10 neighbors in The Athletic CFB's similarity graph are journalists — a subcategory that dominates the set in a way that distinguishes this audience from the broader sports-media landscape. Similarity here measures how closely two entities' audiences resemble each other in composition; a score near 1.0 indicates near-identical audience shape.
Stewart Mandel leads at 0.92, followed closely by Bruce Feldman (0.90) and Pete Thamel (0.90). Pat Forde (0.89) and Brett McMurphy (0.88) extend the journalist cluster further, and Jeff Goodman (0.87) and Jon Rothstein (0.87) — both college basketball beat reporters — show the audience's reach into adjacent sports coverage. The remaining three top-10 neighbors are Yahoo Sports College Football (0.87), a fellow news publisher; Reddit College Football (0.87), a website; and Banner Society (0.87), another news publisher. No TV personalities, athletes, or non-sports entities appear in the top 10 — the cluster is tightly defined by beat reporters and college football–adjacent publishing.
The broad shape reflects the fact that scores remain elevated across all 10 neighbors, with no single dominant spike and no sharp drop-off. What the data reveals is an audience that tracks individual journalists as closely as it tracks the publication itself — a shape defined by reporter-level loyalty rather than outlet-level loyalty.
