An enclave of Pittsburgh fans in Oregon? The surprising map that shows how the country is divided over the NFL



New York University PhD candidate Sean Taylor has published a series of new maps based on Facebook figures that show a surprising social and geographical breakdown of NFL fans.

About 35 million people on Facebook have 'liked' one of the 32 NFL teams, or roughly one out of every ten Americans. Those numbers now show a divided country loaded with random fan clusters and holdouts.



Not since the Civil War has the nation and states looked so fractured.

Using Facebook information, New York University PHd candidate Sean Taylor has generated a new series of maps showing the social and geographical breakdown of NFL fans

'Technically this was all quite trivial, mostly just aggregating users by teams and geography,' he explains on his blog. 'If I had had more time, I would have looked for rivalries. The idea was to look for some pairs of teams that despite having pairs of fans in close proximity are unlikely to have fan friendships.'

Mr Taylor, who crunched the data during an internship at Facebook Data Science, looked at how many users clicked 'Like' for each team's page on each day throughout the season.

'Most teams are accruing new fans on Facebook throughout the season, but teams who win are doing it faster. Making the playoffs, whether you win or lose, seems to give a team's Facebook page a huge boost in fans. Some people just like to hop aboard the bandwagon,' he says.

While winning is obviously key element, Taylor says other factors are at play, too.



'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.'

This graph looks at how many users clicked 'Like' for each team's page on each day throughout the season



By considering the physical locations of NFL fans, Taylor constructed a map of the top team for each county in the U.S.

'It tells an interesting story about the ways that football rivalries and allegiances alternately divide and unite the country, and sometimes even individual states.' Sean Taylor In some cases, whole states and even entire regions of the country uniformly support a single team. 'For instance the Vikings are easily the only game in town in Minnesota,' he says. 'While New England (minus New York) appears to be comprised of entirely Patriots fans except for a small portion of Connecticut.'

There are some states which are divided into regions by teams.

'Florida has three teams--the Tampa Bay Bucs, Miami Dolphins, and the Jacksonville Jaguars--and Facebook users there seems fractured in their support, with some counties even defecting to teams from the North.' he writes.

'Ohio is another interesting story, with the Cleveland Browns in the North, Cincinatti Bengals in the South, and Pittsburgh Steelers fans occupying the middle of the state.' He added that teams like the Steelers, Cowboys, and Packers 'transcend geography, with pockets of fans all over the country. On the other end of the spectrum, the Jets have to share New York with the Giants and are only the most popular team for a single stronghold county in Long Island. At the start of the playoffs in early January, only 12 teams were still playing football.

'We can create the same map of the most Liked teams by county while removing the 20 non-playoff teams. Here we see the playoff map:



This map focuses on Facebook data during the playoffs. 'It's striking just how much geographic area of the country was rooting for the Denver Broncos come January,' Taylor says And then there's the Denver Broncos. 'It's striking just how much geographic area of the country was rooting for the Denver Broncos come January,' he said. 'You may also notice that with the the home-area fans of some teams removed from the sample, the remaining fans often Like one of their rivals.

'Tennessee, home of the Titans, became an extension of the Indianapolis Colts fan-base at the start of the playoffs. Most Facebook users in Illinois, usually fervent Chicago Bears fans, were probably hoping the rival Packers would continue their regular season success.'

Taylor created maps for the subsequent rounds of the playoffs to show how the fans of remaining teams were distributed geographically as the post-season progressed

With only two teams left for the Super Bowl, Taylor found the country divided more or less by geography, with 49ers fans dominating the West and the Ravens being the most popular in counties in the mid-Atlantic and Southern states Taylor created maps for the subsequent rounds of the playoffs to show how the fans of remaining teams were distributed geographically as the post-season progressed. With only two teams left for the Super Bowl, Taylor found the country divided more or less by geography, with 49ers fans dominating the West and the Ravens being the most popular in counties in the mid-Atlantic and Southern states. A nation is divided between Baltimore Raven (blue) and San Francisco 49ers (red)

Even the most die-hard fans among us have some friends who root against us.

While it turns out that most friendships between NFL fans on Facebook are between fans of the same team, we wondered, what about the rest of the friendships? Which rival teams' fans are most likely to hang out on Sunday to bond over beer and wings despite their conflicting allegiances?