Friday, February 1, 2013

Facebook's View of Packer Nation

An interesting experiment - Facebook has been analyzing their data to see what it can tell us about the nature of fanbases all across the country.
While winning seems to matter, NFL teams have local followings that are probably heavily influenced by family ties and/or where a person grew up, so we were obviously curious to see where the fans for various teams live now. By considering the physical locations of NFL fans, we can construct a map of the top team for each county in the US. It tells an interesting story about the ways that football rivalries and allegiances alternately divide and unite the country, and sometimes even individual states.
Here's what they came up with:


Interesting. All of Wisconsin is Packer Country, of course, and most of the Upper Peninsula, but so are scattered counties in Iowa, Nebraska, North Dakota, Montana, Iowa and Oregon. And then there's Alaska, where the relatively-local Seahawk areas are dwarfed by fans of the Steelers and Packers.

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