The Year In Page Views

The last three bowl games of the college football season will be the BBVA Compass Bowl tomorrow, the Godaddy Bowl Sunday and the BCS championship game Monday.

If you know without looking that the Compass Bowl is between Vanderbilt and Houston and the Godaddy Bowl is between Ball State and Arkansas State, well, then, TigerBlog isn't really sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing.

Is this really how the college football season is supposed to end? A bunch of games that used to be on New Year's Day spread out for a few days, two games nobody in their right mind cares about and then the championship game?

New Year's Day used to be such a great day for football. Bowl games all day, with the best teams in them. Now? Hardly any.

It'll get worse next year, TB presumes, when the BCS becomes a four-team playoff. Yes, the playoff will be way better for determining a national champion.

Still, there was always something really special about the New Year's Day bowl games. And that'll just be further eroded a year from now.

Anyway, it's 2014.
Each time the calendar turns over now, TB always thinks back to when he was a kid and the year 2000 seemed so far in the future. It seemed like it was going to be a whole different world, a futuristic one.

And now? That was 14 years ago.

With the end of 2013, TigerBlog figured he'd take a look back at the most viewed pages on goprincetontigers.com for the last 12 months, which featured nearly 10,000,000 total page views.

He's a bit shocked by what he found.

The top four rarely change - the recruiting information page is No. 1, followed by the staff directory, the ticketing page and the facilities page.

After that, the most clicked on page? Hint - it's an athlete's bio.

Beyond those first four, the next 10 featured two game stories, three coach bios, three athlete bios and two other pages.

Going 2-10, it went like this:

2. future football schedules; 3. giving central page; 4. Bob Surace's bio; 5. Chris Bates' bio, ; 6. Tom Schreiber's bio; 7. Quinn Epperly's bio; 8. Princeton's win over Yale in football; 9. James Perry's bio and 10. Princeton's win over Harvard in football.

So which athlete's bio was No. 1? Baseball player Andrew Christie, the son of New Jersey governor Chris Christie.

There are more bios than anything else in the top 50. In fact, there are 29 bios and 21 non-bios in the top 50, with current Princeton athletes Caraun Reid, Blake Dietrick, Jake Froccaro, Kip Orban and T.J. Bray the next highest. The most viewed members of the Class of 2013 were Mike Catapano and Niveen Rasheed.

The most viewed page for an event recap that wasn't a football game belonged to the men's indoor track and field team's NCAA championship distance medley relay.

The other post-event recaps in the top 50?

Cornell football win. Penn football win. Brown football win. Dartmouth football loss. Penn State men's basketball comeback. Harvard men's squash win. No. 51 was the NCAA fencing championship.

So what can be learned from these numbers?

Well, clearly the football season generated considerable interest. And apparently bios are a huge draw.

TigerBlog is always curious about what the demand is among the people who go to goprincetontigers.com and what the OAC staff has to do to keep pace with that demand.

It's not always easy to figure out what the right direction is. These numbers certainly help.

Meanwhile, the weather in Princeton is awful, with heavy snow and freezing temps. It took 2014 all of two days to get ugly.

Oh, and the early leader for most viewed this year?

In the first two days, it's the men's basketball pregame story for the Liberty game tomorrow.

TB senses it won't hold up.