

Where Football Players Call Home  - chwolfe
http://mode.github.io/blog/2014-01-16-football-hometowns/index.html#

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icefox
[http://xkcd.com/1138/](http://xkcd.com/1138/)

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mxfh
There is a per capital (college-aged male population) view.

Yet there is an issue with the scale, which is quite distorted by single
player/low population (<50k) county values. They should be filtered out for
the definition of the coloring scale. They don't provide any good information
since county population sizes vary by magnitudes. (I wouldn't even
recommending filling the county with a color in these cases as simple dot at
the county centroid should suffice)

Granularity matters, counties are a not a optimal unit for this, aggregating
by congressional districts would better, yet still not optimal.

[added] Alternatively counties could be clustered to some minimum size. The US
Census Bureau provides sets of counties with above 50000 total population as a
XLS spreadsheet.
[http://www.census.gov/people/eeotabulation/data/eeoupcoming....](http://www.census.gov/people/eeotabulation/data/eeoupcoming.html)

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evandena
You just have to cross your eyes and look for color swaths, not individual red
counties.

When that's done, you can see that the South is the clear leader.

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mxfh
Pretty easy to guess why: no hockey (among others) to compete with for sports
talents?

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Crito
There is something more going on than just that. There are places in the US
that take highschool football more seriously than other places take _all_ of
their highschool sports combined. Like, a highschool game isn't just something
students and their families go to, but something the _whole town_ goes to.

Its not like that is the only thing to do in town either, they have cable TV,
the internet, and bars just like the rest of America (well, except for a few
dry counties).

I honestly have no idea what to make of it. Calling football in the south a
religion is cliche, but as far as I can tell it is just an accurate way of
describing it.

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mountaineer
This is great. Would be interesting to pull up the list of players from each
county too.

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91bananas
I'd like to see this across other sports too.

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bennstancil
Yeah, I think I'm going to make the same thing for college basketball. Fewer
player per team could make the map pretty sparse, though.

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oddshocks
It looks like you're missing two states.

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letney
I came here to say the same.

As a resident of Hawaii it often peeves me to see it left out of so many
geographic info-graphics.

Hawaii as a sizeable Polynesian pupulation, so my guess is that both the total
and per-capita numbers for Hawaii are on the high end of the spectrum.

It's too bad this is not revealed in an otherwise great visualization.

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brucehart
Very nicely done. I've thought about doing something similar with college
basketball players. My idea was to plot the locations of the players with a
circle and make the radius of the circle tied to some sort of stat such as
points scored or minutes played (or something more advanced like PER*minutes
played). I think it would give some interesting insights into the recruiting
footprint of each school. For football, there are enough players on each
roster that highlighting the counties gives a similar view.

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bennstancil
Doing the same thing for basketball should be pretty easy (but like you said,
it may not be quite as interesting because there are a lot fewer players). I'm
going to try to put that together this weekend and see how it looks.

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talles
I thought it meant _real_ football...

Quite nice by the way

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mserdarsanli
[http://i.imgur.com/DUtHvrY.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/DUtHvrY.jpg) Definitely a
mod should change the title.

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ashwinl
very nice.

