What?! Seahawks 12th Man ranks ninth on Forbes’ list of best NFL fans

A new Forbes ranking of the best fans in the NFL has the Seahawks 12th Man a little peeved. Fans who hold the world record for crowd noise only came in at ninth place.

“It was a little low for my liking,” says 710 ESPN Seattle host and former Seahawk Dave Wyman.

Fans cheering for the Green Bay Packers topped the list, followed by fans of the Denver Broncos, New Orleans Saints, New England Patriots, Baltimore Ravens, Indianapolis Colts, Dallas Cowboys, and the Pittsburg Steelers.

Wyman, who also played for Denver during his NFL career, laughs at the idea Broncos fans are better than the 12th Man.

“Those fans would turn on you at the drop of a dime. One week you’re in the playoffs and it looks good, then you lose to Tampa Bay on Christmas Day and they turn on you and start screaming and yelling at you,” says Wyman. “I never heard that when I was in Seattle, even when we were 2 and 14.”

710 ESPN host Brock Huard agrees Denver fans can be very fickle, and says Forbes has some real issues with the rankings.

Forbes explained the criteria they used for determining the “best fans”:

“Our ranking is based on five criteria: hometown crowd reach (defined by Nielsen Scarborough as a percentage of the metropolitan area population that watched, attended, and/or listened to a game in the last year), 3 years worth of television ratings (per Nielsen), 3 years of stadium attendance based on capacity reached, 3 years worth of merchandise sales (per NFLShop.com), and social media reach (a combination of Facebook likes and Twitter TWTR +0.13% followers based on the team’s metro area population).”

Huard says the three-year index may be why Seahawks fans aren’t being as well represented as it seems like they should.

“This is going to include your 2011 7-9 season. So if this was a two-year rolling index, or a one year, this would be a different conversation.”

While Seahawks fans might not be the “best fans,” at least according to Forbes, Huard says there’s no question members of the 12th Man should hold one potentially more important title, that for “most effective fans.”

“If you were to survey the other 31 teams in the league, and you were to survey the head coach, and the quarterback, and maybe their defensive captain, and ask which is the toughest stadium to go play in, the absolute most brutal atmosphere that you’re going to face, it’d probably be near unanimous right now [that it’s CenturyLink] with what the 12th Man is doing.”