Understanding The Landscape of College Football - Non Visual

[LAZ 99]

Here is a breakdown of all 768 (4 year) college football teams by state. I also created several maps that display a perfect visual of what I'm trying to show and discuss but unfortunately the files are a bit too large for me to post here. I'm pretty upset about it but maybe someone can educate me. It says I'm only allowed to post 81K. Help anyone?

STATE	State Tot	P5	G5	FCS	D2	D3	NAIA	N/A
Pennsylvania	53	2	1	8	16	26	0	0
Texas	41	5	7	8	7	10	4	0
Ohio	41	1	7	2	9	21	1	0
North Carolina	33	4	3	7	13	5	1	0
Illinois	33	2	1	4	2	19	5	0
New York	31	1	2	9	1	18	0	0
Massachusetts	29	1	1	3	4	20	0	0
Virginia	26	2	2	6	3	10	1	2
Iowa	26	2	0	2	1	11	10	0
Minnesota	25	1	0	0	9	15	0	0
Michigan	24	2	3	0	9	7	3	0
Missouri	21	1	0	2	10	2	6	0
California	20	4	3	4	1	8	0	0
Florida	20	3	4	4	2	0	7	0
Indiana	20	3	1	3	1	8	4	0
Kansas	19	2	0	0	4	0	13	0
Tennessee	18	2	2	6	3	3	2	0
Georgia	18	2	2	2	8	2	2	0
Wisconsin	18	1	0	0	0	17	0	0
Kentucky	17	2	1	3	2	1	8	0
Alabama	16	2	3	5	3	2	1	0
South Carolina	14	2	1	6	4	0	1	0
Oklahoma	13	2	1	0	8	0	2	0
West Virginia	13	1	1	0	10	1	0	0
Louisiana	12	1	4	6	0	1	0	0
Arkansas	12	1	1	2	6	1	1	0
Oregon	11	2	0	1	1	5	2	0
Connecticut	10	0	1	3	2	4	0	0
Mississippi	10	2	1	3	2	2	0	0
Maryland	10	1	1	2	2	4	0	0
South Dakota	10	0	0	2	5	0	3	0
Colorado	10	1	2	1	6	0	0	0
Nebraska	10	1	0	0	3	1	5	0
New Jersey	9	1	0	2	0	6	0	0
North Dakota	9	0	0	2	2	0	4	1
Montana	7	0	0	2	0	0	5	0
Maine	7	0	0	1	0	6	0	0
Washington	7	2	0	1	1	3	0	0
Utah	6	1	2	2	1	0	0	0
Idaho	5	0	1	2	0	0	1	1
New Hampshire	5	0	0	2	2	1	0	0
Arizona	5	2	0	1	0	0	2	0
New Mexico	5	0	2	0	3	0	0	0
Rhode Island	4	0	0	3	0	1	0	0
District of Columbia	4	0	0	2	0	2	0	0
Delaware	3	0	0	2	0	1	0	0
Vermont	3	0	0	0	0	3	0	0
Nevada	2	0	2	0	0	0	0	0
Canada- BC	1	0	0	0	1	0	0	0
Hawaii	1	0	1	0	0	0	0	0
Wyoming	1	0	1	0	0	0	0	0
TOTAL 4 YR COLLEGE TEAMS	768	65	65	126	167	247	94	4

 

 

[LAZ 99]

 I've been attempting to mathematically show which areas of the country are best at football. As Floridians, we fundamentally believe the best college ball is played in the South. And obviously with the likes of Clemson, Alabama and LSU, it's very hard for others to dispute. But while attempting to validate this, I ran into a bit of a snag. As you can see above, the distribution of football playing colleges throughout the US is completely unbalanced. There are over 200 more colleges playing football east of the Mississippi River than there are to the west of it. If we dig into it further, there are "holes" found all over the map showing major imbalances depending on the level of football being discussed. For example, in New England, there are 58 colleges playing football but only one (Boston College) plays at the P5 level. In NY, NJ, Pennsylvania, Delaware there are another 96 football schools, 4 of which play P5 football. So out of the 154 colleges in the Northeastern US, only 5 play big time P5 football. This leaves 60 P5 schools for the rest of the country, 22 of which can be found in the traditional south. So I found the map to be geographically biased towards selected areas of the country. To compound matters, the more regions I used, the worse the situation became. So I decided to categorize each region and distribute the teams as fairly as possible trying to keep the number of teams and areas "balanced." The comparisons will be divided as follows:

P5 (North/South), G5 (North/South), FCS (North/South), D2 (East/West), D3 (East/West), NAIA (East/West).

To do this, I was required to completely disregard Conferences. So please keep that in mind because it will mess you up. 

The data will be shown on my next post.