Jim Harbaugh and Urban Meyer in Breathtaking Race to Amass More Fake Twitter Followers

Jim Harbaugh and Urban Meyer are both highly sought after men in their craft. While the latter has inarguably had more success as a college football coach, nearly any program in the nation (in the non-Alabama category) would be ecstatic to land Harbaugh as a consolation prize.

As the gentleman who runs the @RedditCFB Twitter account notes, both of these coaches recently went over one million followers. Meyer got there first, and Harbaugh has since amassed hordes of dubious-looking followers at a breakneck pace:

However, a close inspection of Urban Meyer’s most recent followers hardly indicates anything much different. To settle the debate of which B1G titan has a higher proportion of fake Twitter followers, I decided to pay $3.99 per coach to run a new audit from Twitteraudit.com. The results are as follows:

So, Urban Meyer has slightly more real followers than Jim Harbaugh, and slightly fewer fake ones. Now, it’s highly unlikely that either of these two men is pulling out his credit card and purchasing followers himself — though that would be funny — and it’s also possible that bot farms are just mass-following both of them on their own.

However, the moral of the story going forward is as follows: Any time you see an article uncritically state that Harbaugh or Meyer “sent something to his over one million Twitter followers,” more than half that number is accounted for by fake egg accounts.