THE MAP

PLAYOFF 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. As such, congratulations to West Florida for winning their way onto the map!

By lucky coincidence, every FCS team owns at least one county to start the season. After the results of Week 17, 10 teams remain on the board as well as 1 D2 team. As mentioned above, FBS teams are not allowed on this map, so teams who lost to an FBS opponent aren't affected. A full table listing each team's number of counties, population, and area are given in a comment below. because it is so long, 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. Or check out the discussions about the preseason, Week 0, Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, Week 4, Week 5, Week 6, Week 7, Week 8, Week 9, Week 10, Week 11, Week 12, Week 13 (end of regular season), Week 14, Week 15, and Week 16 maps.

We can begin to see some teams who will finish the season with land. Eight teams: Bethune-Cookman, Colgate, Cornell, Elon, Howard, South Dakota, VMI, and Yale - have finished their season with land, but not made the playoffs, so they will keep it into the beginning of next season. All the D2 teams with land made their playoffs, so the D2 land has all consolidated to the D2 champion, West Florida. By the end of the playoffs, all the playoff territory will be consolidated to the FCS champion. This means that there will be 10 different teams on the map at the end of the season.

THE MAP

PLAYOFF MAP