We 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’s favorite professional football team, as judged by the NFL team that Facebook users in that county have ‘liked’ the most. The New York Times called the baseball version of the map “unprecedented,” arguing that, for questions like this, there’s no superior data set: “Fans may not list which team they favor on the census, but millions of them do make their preferences public on Facebook.” Now we can examine the football version. Here’s 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. First of all, unlike the MLB map, there’s no clear “national” 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. That’s just not a feature of the NFL map. The Cowboys come closest, but they’re not “America’s team” as unambiguously. Beyond Texas and its neighbors, the only isolated pockets of Cowboys fandom are in southern Nevada and southeastern Virginia. That’s it. After 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. And hopefully fans of all of those teams can work up some pity for the New York Jets, whose supporters rule… well, nowhere. No U.S. county has a plurality of Jets fans, at least on Facebook.
Posted on: Mon, 20 Oct 2014 18:57:01 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015