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Nate Silver maps college football geography

In a recent post on the New York Times’ Quad blog, Nate Silver tackles the geography of college football allegiances.  Silver – a noted statistician, blogger and election forecaster who is also credited with developing Major League Baseball’s sabermetric system for predicting player performance – used data from Google web searches and the CommonCensus Sports Map project to map college football team fan areas and then:

…use the results to shine a light on college football’s increasingly complicated realignment picture.

The premise of the study is this: take the 210 television media markets in the United States, figure out how many college football fans they have, and then allocate them between the 120 current Football Bowl Subdivision programs.

See below for images of some of the maps used in the analysis.  Also included below are CommonCensus fan maps for other sports. Click here for interactive versions of all of the CommonCensus maps (along with general info about the project). Click here to add your sports allegiances to the fan maps.

Map showing volume of Google searches for ‘college football’

Hotspot Statistics Map of NCAAF I-A Team Fan Areas

Hotspot Statistics Map of MLB Team Fan Areas

Hotspot Statistics Map of NFL Team Fan Areas


Hotspot Statistics Map of NBA Team Fan Areas


By Janine Glathar

Janine Glathar joined the Digital Pedagogy & Scholarship team in 2009 to fill the newly-created role of GIS Specialist at Bucknell. She has worked in the field of geospatial technologies for more than 15 years as research specialist, technical analyst and software trainer. Prior to joining L&IT at Bucknell, Janine spent seven years doing applied GIS research in Philadelphia’s non-profit social services sector as the GIS Senior Analyst for Philadelphia Safe & Sound and the Greater Philadelphia Urban Affairs Coalition. Before transitioning to the social services research world, Janine worked for the GIS software company ESRI as a trainer and education/non-profit coordinator. She earned a B.A. in European History and Russian Language/Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. If you ask Janine where she’s from, she’ll tell you she’s a Navy brat and will probably offer to show you a map of all of the various places she’s lived over the years.

Areas of expertise:
ArcGIS, Digital Pedagogy, Digital Scholarship, GIS, Google Earth, Spatial Thinking