COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Imagine a world where instead of college football teams playing for national championships, they play for land. And the winner claims the land of the loser.

Now imagine that in this world, Iowa State owns Columbus.

If you've seen the Buckeye Breakfasts throughout this season, we've featured a map of the United States if college football teams were empires and how it's changed each week.

That's the fictional world of college football imperialism.

It's the creation of Nathan Bingham, a junior at the University of Tennessee majoring in Mechanical Engineering. Known as nbingham196 on Reddit, Bingham had posted different maps on Reddit during the offseason before he decided to make it a season-long endeavor.

"It was relatively common that people would make a statement about fighting for land so I decided to make it a reality," Bingham said.

And so, the map of college football imperialism was born.

He started by finding out the closest FBS school to each county throughout the United States, charting them in an Excel file and coloring them in on a map by hand. Bingham said the whole process took 15 hours by hand before he started doing it by computer.

The way the map worked was that each week, the winner of each game claimed the land of the loser. And on it goes throughout the season.

So when you lose a game, like Ohio State did to Oklahoma, the winner gets all the loser's land. And when Iowa State beat Oklahoma, the Cyclones claimed the land Oklahoma had, which includes Columbus.

While it sounds like a version of the popular board game Risk, Bingham says that's not where the inspiration for the map came from.

He admitted that he initially thought the map was a "stupid idea" and wasn't sure what the reaction was going to be.

"I decided I might as well try and just see if a couple hundred people thought it was a good idea," Bingham said. "Next thing I knew the post on Reddit was the top post in r/CFB (college football's Reddit page) history."

Throughout the season, Bingham has kept very detailed tracking of the map including land owned in square miles, most counties owned and top teams by population.

After Week 7, Ohio State owns more counties than any other team, and has the second-largest amount of land.

But unless the Buckeyes beat a team that beats Iowa State, should the Cyclones lose, they will not regain control of Columbus.

College football was one undisputed champion at the end of the season thanks to the playoff. As far as the imperialism map is concerned, Bingham's champion is a little trickier to determine. But he does have an idea of how to determine a champ.

"Most likely it will be the team that owns land from the most teams," Bingham said. "For example Cal is currently leading with 11 (Cal, Stanford, USC, Washington State, Boise State, Rice, South Alabama, Troy, Ole Miss, UNC, and Western Michigan)."

Should Penn State beat Michigan on Saturday, Ohio State can, in the world of this map, win its way back into Ohio if it beats the Nittany Lions on Oct. 28.