No matter who wins the SEC Championship Game between Alabama and Georgia this weekend, the Bulldogs are rolling past the Crimson Tide in one off-the-field battle.

The Bulldogs’ fan base grew by nearly 74% since 2019, while the Crimson Tide fan base grew by just 10%, according to new research from the Center for Sports Analytics at Samford University.

“If Georgia wins another national championship this year, and has another good year next year, they could become the new leader of the SEC in terms of size of fan base,” said Darin White, the center’s executive director.

While Kirby Smart’s Bulldogs have beaten Nick Saban’s Tide only once since 2007, Georgia’s dominant run through the SEC and College Football Playoff in recent years sparked the fan base growth.

Georgia claimed just under 1.5 million fans by 2019. That jumped to nearly 2.5 million fans by 2022.

For now, Alabama still has the most fans, at just over 3.7 million in 2022. That also grew in recent years, just not as fast. Tide fans are up from just over 3.3 million in 2019, according to the research.

That means Alabama’s fan base is nearly as large as the population of Los Angeles, which is home to 3.8 million people.

Right now, undefeated Georgia tops the CFP rankings, while one-loss Alabama currently sits at No. 8. The teams will kick off on Saturday at 3 p.m. CT in a game with major implications for the playoffs.

[Can’t see the chart? Click here.]

Even as roughly 100 million people on average attended or watched a college football game in 2022, the sport’s growth over the past few years has been small, only about 3%, per the data analyzed by Samford researchers.

“They’re stealing fans from somebody, because there aren’t a whole lot of new fans coming in,” White said of Georgia.

To track the growth of the fan bases, researchers at Samford analyzed consumer survey data from SBRnet. To get a reliable headcount, they used three-year averages, so the 2022 number is the average number of fans between 2020 and 2022.

Meanwhile, Auburn’s fan base, which previously outnumbered Georgia’s, actually shrank by 1% in the past three years, according to the research.