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New Yahoo! Sports Survey Indicates Less Than Half of College Football Fans Feel a Team Can Win Without Cheating

Other key findings include:

• Punishment of rules violations
  Particularly true for men over the age of 35 (with 53% of them agreeing), 43% of overall fans feel there are circumstances under which a college program would deserve the "death penalty" (total elimination of a program for one or more seasons).

• Will trade sex for wins
  One in five fans would consider giving up sex for a year to ensure that their favorite team would win the national championship. Similarly, 1 in 10 wouldn't consider dating a die-hard fan of a rival team.
• Playoffs?
  A majority of men (52%), and 42% of football fans overall, would prefer a playoff system for NCAA football. Only 27% of men prefer the current Bowl Championship Series.
• Bowl game overload
  Maybe enough is enough? With 35 bowl games each season, 11% of fans say there are not enough games, 37% feel there are too many, and 28% say it's just right.

• Student athlete compensation
  The survey found that 31% of fans feel Division-I football players should be paid. This is evenly debated among young men ages 18 to 34, with 44% agreeing that players should be paid and 43% saying they should not.

• Bowl season vs. March Madness
  More respondents prefer college bowl season (33%) over March Madness (25%). Women especially favor football, with 34% preferring bowl season versus 21% enjoying March Madness more.

"NCAA football is clearly in a state of tremendous flux, with ongoing realignment being punctuated by reports of increasingly egregious scandals and rules violations, such as the illicit player benefits reported by Yahoo! Sports at the University of Miami," said Eddie George, Yahoo! Sports College Analyst. "College football still resonates with fans despite this, likely because the games being played on the field are as good as ever and the compelling rivalries that define the sport are still strong."

With bowl season looming, Yahoo! Sports invites college football fans to play Yahoo! Sports College Bowl Pick'em, a free fantasy sports game allowing fans to compete against one another in selecting winners of the 35 bowl games. Players can easily start their own group, join an existing group, or join a group of fans of their favorite school. Registration is open now at http://football.fantasysports.yahoo.com/bowl.

Full survey available upon request.

To read more about this survey, please visit: http://yhoo.it/uZzjJD

About the survey:

Yahoo! partnered with Ipsos OTX MediaCT to conduct the Yahoo! Sports survey in October 2011. We interviewed n=1,500 Americans ages 18 to 64 representative of the U.S. online population via an online quantitative survey.

About Yahoo!:

Yahoo! is the premier digital media company, creating deeply personal digital experiences that keep more than half a billion people connected to what matters most to them, across devices and around the globe. And Yahoo!'s unique combination of Science + Art + Scale connects advertisers to the consumers who build their businesses. Yahoo! is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. For more information, visit the pressroom (pressroom.yahoo.com) or the company's blog, Yodel Anecdotal (yodel.yahoo.com).

Photos/Multimedia Gallery Available: http://www.businesswire.com/cgi-bin/mmg.cgi?eid=50103160&lang=en

Yahoo! Sports
Annie Rohrs, 646-213-6175
Consumer Communications Manager
rohrsa@yahoo-inc.com