Is College Baseball More Popular Than the NHL?

Icon Sportswire. Getty Images.

VS

Peter Aiken. Getty Images.

Listen I know the title of this blog is insanity.  Like there is no shot college baseball is more popular than the NHL.   It just can't be true.   In fact if you said that to me yesterday I would have looked at you like you have 4 heads.   But that's before I had what I consider shocking facts.   

As everybody knows both the College World Series and NHL had a winner take all game last night.   The Tennessee Vols and the Florida Panthers won their respective championships.  Congratulations to both teams and their fans.   

Now as we have done since the beginning of time here at Barstool we immediately put championship merch on sale for both teams.    (After all that is how our bloggers earn their salaries and justify their existence). Anyway what would be your guess on amount of merch sales between the two teams.   10-1 in favor of the Panthers?  20-1 Panthers?  50-1 Panthers?

 VS

Well brace yourselves people.   What I'm about to say is absolutely insane and defies all conventional wisdom.  The University of Tennessee College World Series merch outsold the Florida Panthers merch by an astounding 4-1 margin!    How in the world is that possible?  Is College Baseball bigger than the NHL?   What could possibly account for this?  

Now I know what you're gonna say.   The reason for these shocking results is because we have two of our best guys in Mintzy and Big T covering the CWS.  Meanwhile Barstool doesn't have anybody covering South Florida sports.  So it doesn't matter what the more popular sport is.  You can't compare the two when one sport/city doesn't have any Barstool bloggers covering them and the other does. At least that's what I attributed these surreal numbers to at first.  But then I remembered something.

We DO have a South Florida guy!  A guy whose entire identity is South Florida sports.   Nicky Smokes!   So how the hell can I explain us selling 4x Tennessee merch compared to the Panthers merch?   I'm still trying to figure it out.  The only thing I can come up with is either College Baseball is more popular than the NHL with our crowd or the sales numbers directly reflect the popularity or lack thereof of our bloggers covering the teams.   Nah.  It's gotta be the CWS is more populate than the Stanley Cup Finals right?