Western Iowa and Lansing, we need to have a talk about state loyalties…
I continue to have concerns about treating Facebook like it’s a statistically valid population sample, but the New York Times is doing it anyway again. After mapping out pro baseball loyalties by ZIP Code, it’s done the same for Division I-A college football.
The surprise here is that despite all that talk about Iowa State being more visible in the past decade, the Cyclones get absolutely crushed in the state of Iowa. The only place in Iowa that the Hawkeyes fail to get at least 40% of “the vote” is in southwest Iowa, where the pull of Nebraska is too great.
It’s especially bad for Iowa State in the eastern third, delineated by about US 63/218, as shown in this composite for Traer and Clutier:
Tama County overall: 57-21-2. HUSKER FANS WALK AMONG US.
The sea of Hawkeye gold is broken up only by a rising island centered around Story City, where the split starts around 40-40. That roughly consists of eastern Greene, Boone, Story, western Marshall, southwest Hardin, Hamilton, and southeast Webster counties.
Iowa seals off the southern and northwestern state lines, and even makes inroads into Illinois and Minnesota, but for Lansing in the far northeast, Wisconsin edges out Iowa and ISU by a score of 37-32-6.
It’s maps like these that show the utter futility of thinking the Big Ten would have any interest in Iowa State whatsoever. Second fiddle in your own media market, and occasionally third fiddle in your own state, is not the stuff conference realignment dreams are made of.
Here’s the Times article itself, which helpfully and not-incorrectly labels South Dakota as Also Nebraska.