By Spencer Kitley

This week, in lieu of the usual weekly CoveritLive Social TV rankings, we bring you the top five CiL sporting events of the week. All five slots of the standard Social TV rankings were owned by United States Presidential election coverage and after blogging about that last Thursday we wanted to keep things fresh with a look at the top sports usage of the week in this special edition.

The NFL held a spot in the top three for eight straight weeks in the Social TV rankings with its Thursday Night Football Social TV dashboard and this week it topped the list of CoveritLive sports users.  This week’s game drew an audience of almost 40,000 viewers to the league’s Social TV coverage of the Colts vs. Jaguars.

Claiming the second spot among the week’s top sports users was ESPN’s 2012 College Hoops Draft. The draft pitted ESPN college basketball analyst Fran Fraschilla, bracketologist Joe Lunardi and ESPN.com writers Eamonn Brennan and Myron Medcalf in a fantasy draft where each chose five starters, one reserve, a head coach and a venue.  The group offered commentary as each selection was made and more than 31,000 viewers joined the discussion.

After spending the last two weeks in the Social TV top five, the Chicago Bears land at No. 3 in this week’s sports rankings, drawing an audience of almost 25,000 to the team’s chat during its Sunday night showdown with the Houston Texans.

ESPN notched the fourth position as well with its Sunday morning ESPN Fantasy Football Surround experience. The Worldwide Leader in Sports provides a live video stream and a live chat that accompany their original fantasy programming on ESPN2. The week 10 fantasy chat drew an audience of almost 25,000 viewers.

Capturing the final spot among the week’s top sports users was Yahoo Sports for its Fantasy Football Live implementation. Yahoo’s team of experts takes viewer questions on its live video feed as well as in its live chat that entertained and educated more than 22,000 viewers.

*The CoveritLive blog releases its weekly social TV rankings every Monday. The data for the ranking system is exclusive to events that are tied to a television broadcast and the viewer metric is defined as a reader that actively clicks into a CiL event.