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.
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.
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.
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.
