For funsies! Feel free to contribute your own thoughts on college sports geography.

I found the geographic center of all the schools in a conference and averaged the distance (as the crow flies) to the center for the schools to determine how geographically compact each conference is. Here I'm using the expected alignments for the 2021-22 season. Enjoy!





Data sources
Latitude and longitude of all DI schools: https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/viewer...999998&z=5 (download KML file)
To calculate geographic center: http://www.geomidpoint.com/
To calculate distances to center: http://edwilliams.org/gccalc.htm

One interesting fact I learned (that's not strictly geography-related) while making the lists above is that only 8 DI conferences have the same football membership as basketball membership: the Big 12, Big Ten, CUSA, Ivy, MAC, Pac-12, SEC, and SWAC.

It's interesting the role outliers play. The Big West would be much higher up the list if it wasn't for Hawaii. The Big 12 undoubtedly would be higher without WVU.

The ~150 mile difference from the geographic center (give or take, depending on whether the non FB schools are included) reaffirms my argument that the SB, while not compact, is much better off than C-USA, which expands farther north, south, east, and west.

A strong job by Nerdlinger. One of the more fascinating break-downs of statistics I have ever seen on the board. I enjoyed perusing.

(10-11-2020 02:44 PM)Nerdlinger Wrote:  One interesting fact I learned (that's not strictly geography-related) while making the lists above is that only 8 DI conferences have the same football membership as basketball membership: the Big 12, Big Ten, CUSA, Ivy, MAC, Pac-12, SEC, and SWAC.

Big Sky makes nine
If the Big Sky split football like people have talked about.
UNC and SUU to the WAC for Seattle would tighten it up quite a bit.
WAC would be tighter and id CSU left not that bad.

Fantastic Data and Fantastic Effort. I'll bet there's some sort of correlation with travel costs. And I wonder about fan affinity correlation.

Great Data!

A few takeaways:

-NEC surprised to see them on the top of the list because they don't seem that compact as difficult as it is to travel to some of those schools.

-MWC is touted as a regional conference but travel sucks just there too.

-SBC has good regionalism by division which makes travel distance more manageable.

My two cents...

What’s apparent from this data is that the western US is really spread out. The PAC, WAC, MWC and Big West all have much larger footprints than the east coast conferences. Maybe distance is not a good indicator of cultural cohesion.

Also, the conferences that are most successful at chasing TV media payouts (P5, as well as American and Big East) are constantly expanding their geographic reach. A responsibility of successful conference commissioners is to align the competing interests of schools from increasingly far away footprints.

That’s a nice set of stats. Any chance you can superimpose the geographic centers of each conference onto Wikipedia’s D1 maps?

I’d also be interested to see a list of schools who are the biggest geographic outliers overall.

(10-12-2020 01:09 PM)Fighting Muskie Wrote:  That’s a nice set of stats. Any chance you can superimpose the geographic centers of each conference onto Wikipedia’s D1 maps?

I’d also be interested to see a list of schools who are the biggest geographic outliers overall.

The second request is easy with the data I have:



The first is a taller ask, so it'd be a while before I could get around to that. Here are the latitudes and longitudes I found for each conference center, in case anyone wants to map them:

Conference,Sport,Center Lat,Center Long
A-10,BB,39.66648,-78.00713
ACC,BB,36.692255,-80.536958
AmEast,BB,42.287884,-73.108843
American,BB,34.136963,-87.888891
A-Sun,BB,32.988479,-83.300139
Big 12,BB,36.046756,-95.561525
Big East,BB,41.100704,-80.526511
Big Sky,BB,42.661985,-114.233019
Big South,BB,35.609494,-80.256535
Big Ten,BB,41.419656,-85.705352
Big West,BB,33.957198,-122.556828
CAA,BB,38.117548,-76.601207
CUSA,BB,32.935422,-88.579209
Horizon,BB,41.478779,-84.332488
Ivy,BB,41.609316,-73.515346
MAAC,BB,41.482383,-74.722608
MAC,BB,41.472478,-83.661714
MEAC,BB,37.676226,-77.223998
MVC,BB,40.138708,-89.686324
MWC,BB,38.701491,-113.141199
NEC,BB,41.079981,-74.097691
OVC,BB,36.960173,-87.066861
Pac-12,BB,39.537329,-117.089552
Patriot,BB,40.846966,-75.036869
SEC,BB,34.179059,-87.669725
SoCon,BB,34.970698,-82.508219
Southland,BB,30.734031,-94.269784
Summit,BB,42.395797,-96.301791
Sun Belt,BB,33.022805,-88.647353
SWAC,BB,31.870067,-89.764186
WAC,BB,36.528894,-107.310792
WCC,BB,38.563352,-119.387499

Conference,Sport,Level,Center Lat,Center Long
ACC,FB,FBS,36.324075,-80.159099
American,FB,FBS,34.253221,-86.08956
Big 12,FB,FBS,36.046756,-95.561525
Big Sky,FB,FCS,41.805754,-115.384738
Big South,FB,FCS,36.324607,-80.408583
Big Ten,FB,FBS,41.419656,-85.705352
CAA,FB,FCS,40.176149,-74.980589
CUSA,FB,FBS,32.935422,-88.579209
Ivy,FB,FCS,41.609316,-73.515346
MAC,FB,FBS,41.472478,-83.661714
MEAC,FB,FCS,37.31122,-77.569368
MVFC,FB,FCS,42.004914,-91.698182
MWC,FB,FBS,37.989899,-117.212642
NEC,FB,FCS,41.258663,-74.448164
OVC,FB,FCS,36.701314,-87.177037
Pac-12,FB,FBS,39.537329,-117.089552
Patriot,FB,FCS,41.019561,-75.11689
Pioneer,FB,FCS,38.630692,-87.486713
SEC,FB,FBS,34.179059,-87.669725
SoCon,FB,FCS,34.846012,-82.801969
Southland,FB,FCS,31.054501,-94.364085
Sun Belt,FB,FBS,32.84102,-87.437339
SWAC,FB,FCS,31.870067,-89.764186