College Football Home Attendance Leaders- 2017 Season
The information I did for my data visualization project was finding the top 10 home attendance leaders in college football from the 2017 season. In this project I had to find the data from the NCAA website, find the FIPS code for each county that was very time consuming, and then take all of my data and put it into a chart and map to make it easy to see. The story this information shows is that college football teams with the most amount of history and success draw the biggest crowds during their season. If you just look at the top 10 teams you know that these teams are always successful year after year and have many years of history. Also, another thing this information shows is that teams with the biggest stadiums around the country often have the most people inside their stadium watching their team on a weekly basis. The more seats a college football team has the more options people have of not only where they want to sit, but also them attending the game.
We can use this information to inform the audience about our topic by taking a look at the map of the United States and seeing where these top 10 teams are from. Most would think it would be 10 teams in the south because it is always warm, and they often have better teams and crowd atmospheres. However, as you can see from the picture below that these 10 teams are quite spread out. A prime example is the Southeastern Conference or the SEC for sort. If you are a college football fan it is a goal to make it to an SEC game because of the crowd and atmosphere you are in. Unlike tailgating up here in Michigan where there could be snow on the ground in the middle of October, in the south it is warm year-round which is perfect for tailgates and football.
Also, we can use this information when informing the audience in our topic by what I mentioned above. If you are a successful team, and have a larger stadium than most, people will come. Just the from the movie ‘Field of Dreams’ where one of the biggest quotes from that movie is “if you build it, they will come”. If you build a successful program and beautiful stadium, people will come. Even for a team (Nebraska) that isn’t doing well the last couple of seasons, still draws almost ninety thousand people for a football game. That is absurd with how bad they’ve been in recent history. Rich history like most of the schools are the reason that these schools are in the top 10. One school in particular (Penn State) has arguably one of the best atmosphere’s in college football. A night game against a top-25 opponent, Penn State will put together what is called a ‘white-out’ and that place is absolutely bonkers. If you are a team coming to Happy Valley for a ‘white-out’ game, good luck.
Link to CFB home attendance leaders:
http://fs.ncaa.org/Docs/stats/football_records/Attendance/2017.pdf
