With the college football season starting this weekend and we are looking to find which of the “top” football programs own the best domain name.
Of course most schools own their .edu domain for the official site of the university, yet most of the major college sports programs have their own site for just the athletic programs and that’s what were looking at here.
I’m going to start with my team the Florida Gators (winners of 2 of the last 5 BCS national championships).
FloridaGators.com is the natural, but is owned by someone in Orlando who is selling all sorts of Gator merchandise.
Gators.com is a parked domain.
UF.com is a parked domain.
So the official site is GatorZone.com, the Gators also advertise GoGatorNation.com but unfortunately didn’t lock up GatorNation.com which is owned by by a company in Gainesville, so while the Gators have won there fair share of championships, they are clearly not going to win this one. (thank god they named that drink Gatorade).
The Gators in-state rivals, the Florida State Seminoles own FSU.com and their sports site is Seminoles.com
Damn
Those are good.
They did miss FloridaState.com which is owned by a company allowing fans to have Florida State email addresses.
The other big football program in Florida is the Miami Hurricanes and their site is Hurricanesports.com
MiamiHurricanes.com goes to a large store selling gear from schools all around the country, Footballfanatics.com.
Here are some other major football programs from around the country
Staying in a SEC
LSU owns LSU.com but uses LSUSports.net (even through they also own LSUSports.com)
The Alabama Crimson Tide goes with RollTide.com, which I rather like.
For the record ALABAMACRIMSONTIDE.COM is a parked page as is AlabamaTide.com
The Georgia Bulldogs had to settle with GeorgiaDogs.com
GeorgiaBulldogs.com is parked.
The defending National Champion’s the Auburn Tigers have their official site at AuburnTigers.com
Nicely done.
Moving out of the SEC here are some of the other top programs:
Lets start with an easy one Stanford owns Standford.com
It goes down from here.
BOISESTATE.COM is owned by the university but for some reason is just going to a NetSol coming soon placeholder filed with ads which I’m assuming the school isn’t receiving any revenue from.
Their official site is Broncosports.com
How does a university own their bang on .com and allow it to go to what is basically a parked page?
FAIL
On the other hand the Ohio State Buckeyes official site is at OhioStateBuckeyes.com.
OhioState.com seems to be owned by CBS and the domain does not resolve.
The school is also know as The Ohio State University, and theohiostateuniversity.com is parked
OregonDucks.com is parked and the The Oregon Ducks official site is GoDucks.com.
Like FSU, TCU owns TCU.com but that domain doesn’t resolve.
TCU stands for Texas Christian University, the domain name TexasChristianUniversity.com is owned by Marchex.
Their official site is GoFrogs.com.
FAIL
The Texas Longhorns use TexasSports.com
TheTexasLonghorns.com and TexasLonghorns.com are in use.
OklahomaSooners.com is parked so the school is uses Soonersports.com as its official site.
No recap of college football could be complete without the arguable most famous albeit not recently successful program of Notre Dame.
While the college owns the domain name NotreDame.com like BoiseState, the domain is going to a NetSol page full of ads.
That domain NotreDame.com is according to Alexa in the top 5,500 of all sites in the US and the traffic is being wasted.
Their official site is UND.com
The school is known as the Fighting Irish.
Thefightingirish.com is a parked page and fightingirish.com is going to a page with just an email on it.
FAIL.
There are around 120 Division 1 schools so there is a good chance I left your favorite school off the list but I have some games to watch.
Feel free to let me know what your favorite school teams site is and who owns the natural domains if the school doesn’t.
These institutions generate tens of millions each year from their sports programs, and there overall failure to understand the value of domain names is quite apparent.
The schools have by in large failed to secure domains they should be entitled to or should have locked up long ago, including natural alternatives.
The fact that some of the schools own their bang on .com and are allowing them to not resolve or sit on NetSol servers with ads rather than even pointing them to their official sites is absolutely shocking.
An also strange finding is that “the Greenbaychill” (the new LFL team) is using
“mygreenbaychill.com ” as their official website.
Greenbaychill.com is a parked domain.
New TLDs .FOX .ESPN
…
wow that is Shocking
As an Alabama graduate and a 10 year Tuscaloosa resident I loved that they chose RollTide.com as the site. I like nationalchampion.com as well
Go Gators! 😀
so what would you say the intellectual property rights are in a team name like gators, tide etc if you were using for selling football merchnadise
well, if you had i.p. rights in something, what would you do? maybe you’d _register_ them somewhere, so others would be on notice?
it’s smart to check for tm’s, as anyone can do free and easily these days.
wrt the school’s name itself, the edu extension is not enough for some universities, who we will not mention, but in most cases everyone has heard of them. they also register in .com. why is that?
we will leave that as an exercise for the reader.
and some uni’s do actively enforce their trademarks online. some made strategic domain name acquistions in .com back in the 90’s, before the term “domaining” even existed. you might even see them try to register the “tm.com” itself. not all uni’s are clueless wrt the www.
does this also extend to the names of their sports teams?
don’t just assume it doesn’t. as is common, mhb is throwing you bones. but a sniff test is prudent before you start chewing on them. do your homework.
it’s likely _some_ universities _will_ come after you if you just ignore their trademarks.
as always, wrt tm infringement, it makes a difference what’s displayed on the web page. e.g., if fightingirish.com is a site having nothing to do with sport or whatever classes und might have registered in, there’s not much a und lawyer can do to harass the domain registrant, _on the basis of tm law_.
Not to be confused with “Gators” …. I have GATERS.NET …. as in “TailGaters”
I predict ND’s will be changed soon 🙂
…that was quick. Now if they could only turn around their offense that quickly, we might actually have a football team worth watching this year.
I watched the game from here…
http://www.bahistv.tk/
It worked very well. They have a lot of soccer games.