{"id":8133,"date":"2014-10-11T17:25:57","date_gmt":"2014-10-11T17:25:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/2014\/10\/11\/the-geography-of-nfl-fandom\/"},"modified":"2014-10-11T17:25:57","modified_gmt":"2014-10-11T17:25:57","slug":"the-geography-of-nfl-fandom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/2014\/10\/11\/the-geography-of-nfl-fandom\/","title":{"rendered":"The Geography of NFL Fandom"},"content":{"rendered":"


\nThe Patriots really do rule New England, and the Cowboys might just be America’s team. But after that, things get complicated.
\n\t\"\"
\n\tThis map displays Facebook fans of NFL teams across the United States. Each county is color-coded based on which official team page has the most ‘Likes’ from people who live in that county<\/span><\/p>\n

\tOn Thursday, the Seattle Seahawks crushed the Green Bay Packers in the first regular NFL game of the season.<\/p>\n

\tOne way of looking at that: The 46 players wearing Seattle Seahawks uniforms had a higher score than the 46 players in Green Bay Packers uniforms, in a nationally televised game of American football.<\/p>\n

\tAnother? The residents of Seahawks terrain\u2014which stretches from the northernmost Alaskan tundra to the potato fields of central Idaho\u2014won some spiritual victory against the cheeseheads of Packers territory, which consumes all of Wisconsin and some of Michigan\u2019s upper peninsula.<\/p>\n

\tWe can be so precise about these geographies of fandom because the Facebook Data Science team just released its 2014 NFL American fandom map. The map shows every American county\u2019s favorite professional football team, as judged by the NFL team that Facebook users in that county have \u2018liked\u2019 the most. <\/p>\n

\tThe New York Times called the baseball version of the map \u201cunprecedented,\u201d arguing that, for questions like this, there\u2019s no superior data set: \u201cFans may not list which team they favor on the census, but millions of them do make their preferences public on Facebook.\u201d<\/p>\n

\tNow we can examine the football version. Here\u2019s a larger version of the map if you want to check out your home county, but there are also some regions and phenomena that stuck out.<\/p>\n

\tFirst of all, unlike the MLB map, there\u2019s no clear \u201cnational\u201d team. In the baseball map, Yankees fans functioned like cosmic background radiation. Love for the the Bronx Bombers bubbled up in the absence of some local franchise, appearing not only in greater New York City but also in North Carolina, Nebraska, Nevada and New Mexico. <\/p>\n

\tThat\u2019s just not a feature of the NFL map. The Cowboys come closest, but they\u2019re not \u201cAmerica\u2019s team\u201d as unambiguously. Beyond Texas and its neighbors, the only isolated pockets of Cowboys fandom are in southern Nevada and southeastern Virginia. That\u2019s it. <\/p>\n

\tAfter the Cowboys, the Broncos control a huge region. Pluralities of Broncos fans can be found all the way from three of the Four Corners to the 49th northern parallel. Rivaling the Broncs in terms of sheer regional hegemony are the 49ers, which rule almost all of California; and the Patriots, whose fans run from Hartford, Connecticut to Caribou, Maine.<\/p>\n

\tAnd hopefully fans of all of those teams can work up some pity for the New York Jets, whose supporters rule\u2026 well, nowhere. No U.S. county has a plurality of Jets fans, at least on Facebook.<\/p>\n

\tMost interesting to me, though, is the Great Lakes region, where old clubs compete for dominance. <\/p>\n

\t\"\"
\n\tThe borders here become stark and stubborn. The Lions would control all of Michigan\u2014except for those pesky Packs in the southern Upper Peninsula. The Colts could claim Indiana\u2014if not for greater Gary. And Packers green hovers at the edge of Vikings country, as if waiting to move in.<\/p>\n

\tThough none of these borders are quite as patchwork as the Jaguars fans tucked between Georgia\u2019s Falcons and Panthers country: <\/p>\n

\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\tAnother place to check out: Los Angeles, whose residents apparently still cling to the Raiders\u2014a franchise which abandoned the city 20 years ago.<\/p>\n

\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\tFacebook is one of many tech companies that periodically releases free analyses of data. In February, for instance, it revealed what it sees when two users fall in love. Data like this is always fun, and helps us get at questions that are otherwise unanswerable\u2014but it\u2019s also a chance to think about everything that giant social networks like Facebook can see, things that are deeper or more important than which team a certain county roots for.<\/p>\n

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Replies:<\/h3>\n

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The Patriots really do rule New England, and the Cowboys might just be America’s team. But after that, things get complicated. This map displays Facebook fans of NFL teams across the United States. Each county is color-coded based on which…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":36,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8133","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8133","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/36"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8133"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8133\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}