Doing a search before starting a thread, I came across this map of loyalty to different NFL franchises. It does not have enough data to answer some questions, so I will pose them here.
What would Alaska vote? I suspect Seahawks.
Arkansas looks like it is solidly Cowboy country. I would have expected more Saints and Titans.
California
Loyalty to the St.Louis Rams in Los Angeles is lower than I expected. (Rams used to play in Anaheim / LA.)
Hawaii ??
Iowa looks like you might be able to cut it into quarters, with the SW going to KC, the SW to Bears NW to Vikings, and NE to Packers.
I would guess that Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, New Mexico, and Nebraska are Denver Bronco country. I would say the same for the parts of Nevada other than Reno and Vegas areas. Reno is 49’er country and Vegas… is too cosmopolitan for me to guess.
Michigan: would upper peninsula be for Lions or Packers or other?
Utah shows a lot of 49’er loyalty. I believe this is the “Steve Young” effect. Young is a Mormon, the great-great-great-grandson of Brigham Young, born in SLC, played for BYU, etc. Before 1987, when he was at Tampa Bay, was Utah Buccaneer country?
WV as a whole has far more Steelers fans from what I obeserved growing up there. Although, the tip of the eastern panhandle counties may favor the Redskins more.
Reno has a lot of Raiders fans as well. The NFL considers us part of the Bay Area market. I hadn’t seen a decent game all season until the playoffs started.
Cool map! I’ve lived in Iowa and there are definitely divided football loyalties there, with so many major teams existing a few hundred miles in different directions outside its borders.
That is cool. I remember a book by the journalist Joel Garreau who used baseball loyalty as an indicator for when you’ve really entered New England. Alaska also has a lot of Cowboy fans, mainly transplanted Texans.
Hawaii used to have a surprising about of Atlanta Braves fans because TBS showed there games and they were the only team most people could follow. How that translates to football I don’t know. Since there a fewer games you can pretty much follow any team on sunday.
So I’m going to have to stretch and say there lots of love for California and probably the Raiders would come out highest here. But it’s probably a very fickle fanship.
I recall there being surprising love for the Phoenix Suns in the small town in Maryland where I grew up. Everyone followed the Bullets, of course (now Wizards), but a lot also wore Suns T-shirts and such and had something of a secret love affair with the Suns. I never figured it out. I wasn’t into sports then and didn’t care, either; and “everyone” was a bunch of elementary school kids, who may have been influenced by a fad involving a particular player of the day.
There was a LOT of love for the 49ers based on the whole Steve Young/Jerry Rice thing, too. And there were some Raiders fans; they always seemed to come out on Halloween.
The Saints just haven’t been a good enough team to draw much regional support. I assume that the Cowboys were the team of preference for so long that the Titans haven’t yet gotten much of a foothold (or maintained any old Oilers fans).
Green Bay is much closer to most of the UP than Detroit. From where I am, Green Bay is about a 3 hour drive. Detroit is more like 12. So we’re almost entirely Packers. There’s a few Lions fans around, but we make fun of them.
From what I’ve seen of Idaho and Montana, as a whole, they pay about as much attention to the NFL as the NFL does to them.
So, it’s all about the NCAA.
In Eastern Washington, there are a lot of Seahawk fans, but there is a pretty diverse mix of transplants who retain their old loyalties.
For the most part, NCAA Basketball and ML Baseball are the sports of choice in E Washington, and you’ll find more Gonzaga Bulldogs and Seattle Mariners fans than Seahawks fans.
That seems to jibe pretty well with what I’ve heard from my friend from E. Wash. What I got from him was that they’re pretty much fairweather Seahawk fans out in the eastern parts of the state (much like Chargers fans down here).
Then again, I’ve also heard that Seattleites are in general too metropolitan to be out-of-the-closet football fans, and you don’t really see “Go Hawks” posters around the city even on an NFC Championship weekend–as loud and supportive as they are on Sunday.