United States of College Football

I ran into this map (Baseball) a while ago on Reddit, and I really liked the idea. I think later, somewhere else I saw an NFL one too. I have wanted to make one for college football for a while now, but I didn't really know how.

Recently, I had started messing around with Inkscape, and I am really liking it so far, as far as a program with which to make maps. This is my first Inkscape map.

I decided to make a map similar to the baseball one above, except with college football teams. It was hard to have a cut-off of which teams to include and which not to. At first I thought I could just use the 6 BCS conferences only. I realized soon that I had to at least include the Mountain West too, other wise that area would either be empty or some Pac-10 and Big 12 teams would have giant areas (in order to cover the whole map). So I included the MWC.

Then I ran into the problem of Nevada and Idaho. Each state has 2 FBS schools (UNLV & Nevada; Boise St & Idaho), 1 in the MWC, and 1 in the WAC. If I were to include the MWC and not the WAC, it would probably create an inaccurate picture of those states. So I decided to include the WAC too. At this point, there was really no reason not to throw in the MAC, Sun Belt, and C-USA. That is what I did. I went on to include every conference in FBS. Although I didn't count, there should be all 120-some schools on this map. 

I made the map realizing that 1) There is no perfect way to make this map, since there will be a ridiculous amount of overlap, irregular shapes, enclaves, exclaves, etc., and a truly accurate map might look very ugly. and 2) I don't know much about how the different parts of the countries watch college football. A lot of the splitting up is done by guess work based on geography and historic success of the football program. From any travels I have done, I know that most major cities are more or less split if there are 2 programs nearby. You will notice that most major cities are split. LA is split between USC and UCLA (obviously), Chicago is split 3 ways between Northwestern, Illinois, and Notre Dame. SF is split between Stanford and Cal (that one was a little hard to do, shape-wise). NYC is split between UConn and Rutgers (those are the 2 closest schools; Syracuse dominates most of upstate NY. There are many many other cities that are split.

I also did a gradient coloring for each of the areas. I didn't want to leave names on the map, because with 120 some names, it would have been too cluttered. I hope the colors and location will be enough to identify each of the shapes. I grabbed the colors from each of the football program's Wikipedia page (where available), using a color dropper Chrome-extension. It's a pretty neat tool. 

So here is version 1, quite possibly the last version if I don't want to pursue this any further. I hope I will go on to fix this up a little with better information about these distributions across the country.