Where Football Players Call Home | Hacker News Reader

Where Football Players Call Home

mode.github.io

41 pointschwolfe24 comments

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....

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.

Check out these two articles:

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/arts-and-lifestyle/2012/04/...

http://www.footballstudyhall.com/2013/9/11/4718442/college-f...

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

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.

They can play and practice year-round without renting out expensive indoor facilities.

I thought the same thing - until I noticed the per capita button. This should be on by default.

Unfortunately it then becomes clear that sample sizes are so small that we can't draw any real conclusions. You look at Garfield county in Montana and there are only 25 college-age males, so the 1 player anomaly makes it suddenly look like a big sports hub.

Cool concept and execution, but insufficient data.

And the data normalized per county is overrun by noise from counties with 10 people and 1 player.

I don't understand how this comic relates to absolute vs per-capita

The more interesting data is when it is filtered by conference or team.

Yes, this should be the focus of it. The blog post does go over school rankings by geographic diversity.

Click "Per Capita" on the map. They have that accounted for.

The per capita map is practically just the inverse of the count map. We're still really only looking at population data.

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

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

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.

It looks like you're missing two states.

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.

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.

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.

I thought it meant real football...

Quite nice by the way

http://i.imgur.com/DUtHvrY.jpg Definitely a mod should change the title.

very nice.

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