Interactive College FB Fandom Map

[CTGoonie]

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/03/upshot/ncaa-football-map.html?_r=0#6,39.563,-75.800

CT is obviously dominated by Uconn.

 

[pepband99]

Very interesting map. I'm wondering how "Florida" became the northeast's team? Seems so untrue and misplaced...

 

[Husky25]

Very interesting map. I'm wondering how "Florida" became the northeast's team? Seems so untrue and misplaced...

Funny that outside the immediate Boston area, BC is not well represented. I don't get the Florida obsession either. How old is the map? Maybe it has to do with Tim Tebow and Aaron Hernandez, pre-arrest.

Lots of Texas fans in Colorado as well. Strange, since Colorado has/had a pretty decent program not so long ago...

 

[Kolumbo]

Cincinnati is a large state school and I don't think it even registered in any county. Strange.

 

[dchusky905]

UNC also.

 

[Mike75]

Lots of Oregon fans in New Hampshire. Chip Kelly effect?

 

[Fishy]

You have an awful lot of snowbirds in the northeast - obviously, they're bringing their Florida-ness north during the warmer seasons.

Some interesting things....

Boston College simply does not register. They never hit over 11% anywhere and they are completely dead 40 minutes outside of Boston - not even top three in Worcester or the South Shore to the Cape.

Rutgers has zero push into New York.

Downstate New York is a muddle.

Penn State is a freaking monster. They've built a wall inside New Jersey - Rutgers doesn't even carry its own state.

You can see the challenge an ACC Network would have....

Boston College doesn't have any swing in Boston, let alone New England. Syracuse controls vast swaths of nothing. Pittsburgh is narrowly the most popular school in Pittsburgh. Clemson brings just a dollop of western South Carolina. Georgia Tech doesn't exist. Louisville is only followed in Louisville.

Virginia and North Carolina are obviously purely the ACC and they're strong enough in Florida to get coverage there...but if you look at the population centers up the 95 corridor from Maryland north, there's nothing happening.

 

[Kolumbo]

Note that UCONN registers quite a bit in western Mass, more so than I expected.
SEC and B1G dominate ACC in shared areas.
UNC doesn't make much noise at all. Surprising.

 

[WestHartHusk]

I would love to see this for basketball.

Also, for some reason southern South Dakota has a lot of Duke football fans??

 

[Husky25]

I would love to see this for basketball.

Also, for some reason southern South Dakota has a lot of Duke football fans??

All 6 of them?

You ever been to South Dakota? Pretty country, but land owners are liable to track their plots in integers as opposed to fractions of an acre. Point being: Small sample size.

 

[UConnJim]

Couple of points about the map. First, it includes only 82 schools which is why Cincinnati and USF don't show up. Second, they state the data for North Carolina has an error which is probably why UNC doesn't show up at all.

 

[UConn9604]

For coloring purposes, it appears that they treat each county or ZIP code as of equal density, which is obviously not accurate. Dominating Alaska (as Oregon does) is nowhere near as valuable as dominating Ohio (as OSU does) is.

 

[Kolumbo]

Couple of points about the map. First, it includes only 82 schools which is why Cincinnati and USF don't show up. Second, they state the data for North Carolina has an error which is probably why UNC doesn't show up at all.

I don't know if what you say is accurate. from the article, "All told, 82 programs can reasonably claim to be the most popular college football team somewhere in the United States." I don't know if Cinci was excluded, or that it just was not the most popular in any zip code. Did you read something else?

Oh, I see. Confusing. "With data based on Facebook ‘likes’, we estimated the boundaries of fandom for 82 teams. OCT. 3, 2014"

 

[CL82]

RU's support is not that intense and is much closer limited to the area around the campus. 'Cuse carries upstate NY but doesn't begin to control NYC. I'd love see the raw data for NYC ...actual number of likes per team. UConn own's Connecticut with intensity and spreads beyond it's boarders into western Mass and RI and then right up into rest of New England, except for the chunk carved out by BCU.
The map is hardly definative, but it is definitely interesting.

 

[Husky25]

WestHartHusk makes a great point. If this is a College FOOTBALL map, there is absolutely no way that many people like Duke outside the Carolinas.

Duke has been to 4 bowls since 1962 ('89, '95, '12, and '13), even in an era where well over half the teams are eligible.

This is one shirt that doesn't pass the smell test. Better put that shirt back in the washing machine.

 

[businesslawyer]

What it appears to show, is that even though Connecticut is much smaller than New Jersey, UConn, even in football, probably has more fans than Rutgers. And that, within the Northeast, it doesn't appear that anyone other than Penn State has a materially stronger position than us (if a stronger position at all). Frankly, the data might be more important if it just showed total number of fans regardless of geography.

Unfortunately, it shows that too late to do us much good.

 

[OkaForPrez]

I would love to see this for basketball.

Also, for some reason southern South Dakota has a lot of Duke football fans??

The sample size in South Dakota might be a dozen dudes. 1 of them is a duke alum studying different kinds of dirt or buffalo.

 

[Kolumbo]

The sample size in South Dakota might be a dozen dudes. 1 of them is a duke alum studying different kinds of dirt or buffalo.

Maybe Cherokee Parks or Shavlik Randolph lives in S. Dakota.

 

[Husky25]

Maybe Cherokee Parks or Shavlik Randolph lives in S. Dakota.

So there is a vote for Duke basketball, but this is supposed to be a football map.

 

[Slasher]

Yeah this whole thing doesn't make a lot of sense. Cincinnati is definitely #1 in Hamilton County, and probably #1 in Butler, Warren and Clermont as well (all part of Cincinnati metro). Ohio State is definitely king in every other county.

 

[Fishy]

Maybe Cherokee Parks or Shavlik Randolph lives in S. Dakota.

I'm sure it's the influence of out-of-state oil workers and a relatively sparse sample size.

 

[UConnJim]

Yeah this whole thing doesn't make a lot of sense. Cincinnati is definitely #1 in Hamilton County, and probably #1 in Butler, Warren and Clermont as well (all part of Cincinnati metro). Ohio State is definitely king in every other county.

They looked at 82 teams. I don't think Cincinnati was included.

 

[WestHartHusk]

I'm sure it's the influence of out-of-state oil workers and a relatively sparse sample size.

Way way off topic, but I don't think SD has nearly the oil-boom that is going on in ND.

 

[freescooter]

Part of it is that you have a frontrunner effect that takes a few years to work itself out. If you looked at this map in 2004, I bet there would be Miami fans everywhere. Now they are in South Florida. And part of it is that in major cities, New York is example one but there are others, people come from many places and bring their allegiances with them. My guess is it is behind theTexas fans in Colorado, for instance, where Denver in particular attracts people from all around the west. Guessing the Oregon fans are more related to the Duck's success at the moment than much else. Odd that Cal doesn't register in the Bay area at all.

 

[Fishy]

Way way off topic, but I don't think SD has nearly the oil-boom that is going on in ND.

No, but they have one.

The Bakken formation extends into SD as well.