THE MAP

Most of us on r/fcs are familiar with the concept of imperialism maps. This year, I'm going to maintain one for the FCS. This map assigns each county in the United States to it's closest FCS team. As games are played, winning teams take the land owned by their opponents. This leads to interesting results after several weeks of results accumulate. Beating a team with no land does not result in any land gained for the winning team. Moreover, in this map, FBS teams do not get any land for beating FCS teams (although I may make a separate map allowing such if time permits). However, Division II, III, and NAIA teams are eligible to win their way onto the map by beating landowning teams.

By lucky coincidence, every FCS team owns at least one county to start the season. This means that every team has something to fight for in their first game. Week zero has only two FCS games: Villanova at Colgate, and Youngstown State at Samford. This means that 70 counties (2.23% of the map), 64,633 square miles (1.70% of the map), and 13.9 million population (4.50% of the map) are up for grabs on August 24th. Abilene Christian begins with the most counties (166), while San Diego has the largest population (20,519,280), and Portland State has the most total area (657,119 sq mi). Surprisingly, they do not own all of Alaska. In fact, both Alaska and Hawaii are split to begin the season. A full table listing each team's number of counties, population, and area are given in a comment below. It is 127 rows, so I put it in a comment so that you can minimize it to get it out of the way.

I do my best to check everything in these maps, but if you do notice a mistake, please let me know. I will fix things in future maps. The location data is taken from either Wikipedia or Google Maps, while county information is from the US Census Bureau. Special thanks to /u/nbingham196 for the original idea and for doing the FBS map, as well as /u/johndoemonopoly for helping me get some utilities set up to automate most of the map making processes.

I also posted this map to r/cfb. Check out our discussion over there.

THE MAP