Which College Football Team Does Your Hometown Root For?

The New York Times has a new interactive showing which college football teams the country roots for, according to data it has exclusively from Facebook. Fandom is broken down into ZIP codes, which you can zoom in and mouseover to see in detail, with percentages—which is the only way you can see some teams show up on the map.

The Times has a good writeup of its findings, which you can find here, but there are a few things worth pointing out, since there is a much tighter bunching in this map compared to the Times's previous cracks at the NBA and MLB.

This is a screengrab that the Times is using to illustrate that Texas has a stranglehold on Texas. This is typically the case for states with a big state school—Ohio State, Penn State, Florida, et al have their states similarly locked down.

But if you click through to the interactive, you can see that the fandom both flips at the state line (this wasn't common in the NBA and MLB, really) and grows increasingly concentrated as you get closer to the team's stadium. In more or less a straight line from the top of Texas to Oklahoma's Gaylord Family-Oklahoma Memorial Stadium, Oklahoma fandom goes from being outgunned just across the border, 33 percent to 14 percent, to 51 percent once you step foot into the state, to 61, 68, 69, 70,and finally 73 percent, in a straight line north.

There's plenty more to poke through, like how little support UCLA has in Los Angeles, or the college football wasteland in the New York City area, which has somehow been locked down in large part by Notre Dame, or whatever dumb thing your home ZIP code is doing, so read the full NYT p iece here.

[ New York Times]