The East Coast Bias theory holds that in U.S. sports, college football and basketball in particular, teams in the eastern part of the United States get more favorable coverage or more exposure because of their proximity to the major media centers of the northeastern United States. This also extends to the amount of "respect" a team gets from the media and, therefore, the public, which gets most of their information and forms most of their opinions from the media. Some who subscribe to this hypothesis attribute this to the time difference between the East Coast and West Coast of the United States - a late game on the West Coast will often end after a East Coast paper's deadline or after an East Coast newscast has to air. Some attribute it to a regional ignorance on the part of the northeast.

One of the hypothesis's biggest shortcomings is that it fails to take into account how college football, a sport that is much more popular outside the northeastern U.S. than within, is one of the most covered events in the nation. It also does not explain how some teams outside the northeast, such as the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team and the University of Southern California football team get favorable coverage. A possible explanation is that both of those teams were very dominant at the time of the "favorable coverage" and the extent of the dominance was too big to ignore. The discussion of East Coast bias often does not consider interior areas of the U.S.