When people in most places hear “USC,” almost all of them think of the University of Southern California, not of South Carolina. When they hear “UM,” they’re pretty sure it’s Michigan, although some think of Minnesota or Montana. And when they read about “Tech,” they think they’re reading about Texas Tech more than others.
These college football maps show the ‘real’ UT is Texas, not Tennessee
College acronym maps tell us who’s really whom.
Those, and plenty more interesting consensuses, are available in a set of acronym maps posted this week by Reddit user geoforceman, who polled Reddit to get the data. Here’s part of the explanation:
Also note that this survey was taken only by members of the reddit community who pay attention to college football. I’m sure the results would differ if I went and polled a different demographic. States with small populations (Wyoming, Vermont, etc.) had very few responses resulting in a number of ties and wacky results. There were a lot of states whose responses were really close (51/49) but since this is America, winner took the whole state.
And here are the maps:
There's some pretty interesting stuff here, albeit from a limited sample size.
South Carolina isn't USC in most places other than South Carolina itself. This has been a long-standing conflict, at least around one state, and South Carolina fans have created a style guide to help avoid confusion.
Some schools come out of this looking like winners with national brands. So congratulations to Ohio State, Baylor, Michigan State and Washington. And to Oklahoma State, Boston University, Mississippi State and Wisconsin, there’s always another year and another acronym.
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