pfrduke
10-04-2017, 11:50 AM
I have been enamored by the reddit user who is doing an "Imperialism" map of the college football season and it immediately occurred to me that the same could be done for the NCAA tournament (the NCAA basketball season as a whole doesn't really lend itself well to the same exercise). So I put one together for the 2015 NCAA tournament. Here is the principle - every county in the US is allocated to a school at the start of the tournament, based on geographic proximity*. The tourney then proceeds with the winning team claiming land from the losing team as it goes. This matches the actual chronology of the games (i.e., Notre Dame-Northeastern was the first to tip in the round of 64; Dayton-Providence was the last). So here is the 2015 tournament in GIF form, as well as some of the static images (all 68 teams; Sweet 16; and champion - will stick R32, Elite 8, and final 4 in a subsequent post as I hit an image limit on this one). I'll try to get 2010 up sometime in the near future. I'm also going to try to do an image that puts all the maps on the bracket.
https://media.giphy.com/media/l1J9HEyUDBMSxHHZm/giphy.gif
https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4511/36785434064_647f1cf2b5.jpg (https://flic.kr/p/Y3AXXN)
https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4452/23642877418_27e135cfbe.jpg (https://flic.kr/p/C2eVKy)
https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4479/36785434464_08c6d3dd76.jpg (https://flic.kr/p/Y3AY5G)
Links to full versions:
GIF: http://gph.is/2y15MtO
Gallery of all images: https://www.flickr.com/photos/158793140@N03/albums/72157687459481174
*measured as Great Circle distance from the team's basketball arena to the geographic center of the county. Wikipedia is a great source for GPS locations of arenas, and US census data provides geolocation of counties.
**Mapchart (https://mapchart.net/usa-counties.html) was the source of the map and the tool used to color the counties; piZap (https://www.pizap.com/pizap) was used to add the logos; GifMaker (http://gifmaker.me/) used to make the animation.
https://media.giphy.com/media/l1J9HEyUDBMSxHHZm/giphy.gif
https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4511/36785434064_647f1cf2b5.jpg (https://flic.kr/p/Y3AXXN)
https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4452/23642877418_27e135cfbe.jpg (https://flic.kr/p/C2eVKy)
https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4479/36785434464_08c6d3dd76.jpg (https://flic.kr/p/Y3AY5G)
Links to full versions:
GIF: http://gph.is/2y15MtO
Gallery of all images: https://www.flickr.com/photos/158793140@N03/albums/72157687459481174
*measured as Great Circle distance from the team's basketball arena to the geographic center of the county. Wikipedia is a great source for GPS locations of arenas, and US census data provides geolocation of counties.
**Mapchart (https://mapchart.net/usa-counties.html) was the source of the map and the tool used to color the counties; piZap (https://www.pizap.com/pizap) was used to add the logos; GifMaker (http://gifmaker.me/) used to make the animation.