What if a victorious college football team got to claim all of its opponent’s land? And then the next week, all of that even larger tract was again at stake? We’d keep going until the national champ owned almost the entire country.
What if, for an entire season, each winning college football team took all of its opponent’s land?
One Redditor is using a brilliant map to keep score of this college football season. Here’s how it’d look to this point in 2017.
One user at Reddit’s creative college football hub is keeping track of exactly how this would play out, if each FBS team got to start the season with all the land in its vicinity. Here are nbingham196’s Imgur embeds so far, starting with the GIF overview (if they’re not loading, probably due to Google being funny about embeds from certain sites, check nbingham196’s Reddit page):
And then the week-by-week:
Week 1
Week 2
Oregon now controls much of the Ozarks, MTSU and Wake Forest are advancing into Canada, and teams from five very non-Nevada states battle for control of Nevada:
Week 3
Alabama, Cal, Duke, Memphis, USF, and Washington are all now either coast-to-coast or close to it, if we count the Gulf Coast. Minnesota vs. Iowa could end up being for control of much of the Canadian border.
Week 4
Penn State thunders throughout the Heartland, LSU finds sanctuary near Les Miles’ native lands, and TCU unifies a region and prepares for an Oklahoma encirclement, while Georgia oversees a splintered empire.
Week 5
Florida State and Stanford reappear, Troy-LSU mattered, Miami nearly has land on all four directional borders after being forced from its homeland by a trick of geography, and BEHOLD Maryland’s icy reign.
Week 6
Ohio State, having eventually surrendered its homeland to Iowa State, is now attempting to seal off the entire Canadian border. Miami and UCF are close to having land in every corner of the Lower 48.
Week 7
CHAOS WEEK STRUCK. EVERYTHING IS BROKEN.
Week 8
Miami now controls much of the East Coast, except for Miami itself. (The original setup went by stadium distance from county centers, meaning the Canes’ home went to FIU.)
Week 9
Penn State vs. Ohio State was for a damn heap of dirt, and Iowa State controls hilarious terrain.
Week 10
Bama finally picks up noteworthy land, USC expands, West Virginia has actual Big 12 terrain for once, and IOWA RUNS THE CONTINENT.
Week 11
Wisconsin has unified like a sixth of the country, and Miami has mastered the East Coast. The Iron Bowl’s looking like a battle for a nice plot. And FCS Jacksonville State still controls two areas lol.
Week 12
And now Wisconsin must put all that terrain on the line against Michigan.
This is a genius way to keep track of how the season’s playing out.
It keeps account of how many teams are still in the championship running while also playing off college football’s extreme mappability (see our collection of 25 maps that help explain the sport). For a few years now, SB Nation’s made a Risk board version of the BCS/Playoff picture toward the end of each season, and this series of Reddit maps is gonna end up being even more fun than those.
Looking forward to seeing how R/CFB’s map winds up.
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