The Southern passion for America's war game
Mapping college football's major programs onto Colin Woodard's "American Nations" map makes plain the degree to which football is a southern passion.
We’re going to continue to discuss Colin Woodard’s “American Nations” concept I broached in the last post.
While “American Nations” was published in 2011, he obtained the county by county population figures for his 11 “American Nations” from the 2020 census and the results are pretty interesting.
I made a table for us with those figures while also adding the number of National Championships awarded to schools in each region (some years had two or three champions) since 1950.
Before anyone asks, the SEC had integrated black players into most all of their football teams by 1972 (later than everyone else, naturally) and have won 21 championships since, including the majority of the titles since football established a true title game in 1998.
As a reminder, here’s a map of most of the prominent and/or Championship-winning college football programs superimposed on top of Woodard’s nations:
A striking fact of the map and table above is the dominance by “Greater Appalachia” and “the Deep South.” We’re going to take a few stabs at trying to explain why their dominance would be so great relative to Yankeedom in particular and the rest of the nation in general.