State of the Nation

2008-10-07T13:50:06-04:00

2008-09-09T18:46:50-04:00

2008-09-10T06:38:23-04:00

2008-09-13T19:40:19-04:00

Taylor G. Moore

Joliet 64998

2 You idiot! Obama is not leading in the polls. And besides., what business do you have injecting politics into a sports forum. Leave it the hell out! 2735862

2008-09-10T18:07:40-04:00

bzcat

Playa Vista 486153

1 Luke's methodology leaves much to be desired but I'll take it at face value since there is no debating which way the overall D-1A football Electoral College will swing due to the large number of D-1A schools in the South and Southeast. Basically, imagine if our Congressional districts were made up of a lot of small red districts and only a handful of supersize blue districts rather than a balance of both. However, I doubt that the popular vote count of a mythical college football election will be as close. It will lean blue by a good margin since the more educated (as measured in years of formal schooling) one is, the more liberal that person is likely to vote. This assertion is well supported from all kinds of polling data from both left and right. Granted not all college football fans are college grads but most probably attended some college, hence I believe in such an election, the blues will win the popular vote by a good 30% while losing the Electoral College by even larger margin. 2710845

2008-09-09T21:36:42-04:00

swarbs

Ames 518223

Norka, if football were brutal, they wouldn't wear pads, and if Luke Winn was cutsie, he wouldn't tackle statistics. This piece may have no bearing on anything and prove nothing at all, but it is a bit interesting and I have no reason to believe it would get a better reception in Cosmo whose readership barely knows how to read, let alone math. 2706301

2008-09-09T19:41:11-04:00

http://img.fannation.com/upload/user_profile/image/475/228/thumb/bearG0205_468x551.jpg 4108 Ga

norka

Bubba Spot 475668

And you're on the payroll at Sports Illustrated? Your career would be much better served at the likes of Cosmo or Glamour. Your cutsie style just doesn't mesh with the brutal sport of football. 2705400

2008-09-09T19:04:28-04:00

Mighty Bleistift

Pasadena 199631

Oh no - you just opened up a whole new shouting match. Last time someone tried to mix CFB with politics, the cops had to be called. 2705127

<img style="margin: 5px; width: 425px; height: 300px; float: right;" title="Florida-Miami" src="http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2008/football/ncaa/09/08/utah.telemaivao.ap/blog.fla.ap.jpg" alt="Florida-Miami" width="425" height="300" /> College football is a red-state sport -- that's rather evident, given its Southern power base -- but just how red is it compared to the country as a whole? The Sweep attempts to tackle that question today with the use of two sources: political voting projections from Nate Silver's brilliant polling site, <a href="http://www.fivethirtyeight.com">fivethirtyeight.com</a>, and football polling data from the latest Associated Press <a href="http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/football/ncaa/polls/ap/">Top 25 vote</a>. According to fivethirtyeight's Presidential-race projections, Barack Obama would beat John McCain 273-265 in the Electoral College vote (which equates a 50.7-to-49.3 percent divide). Fivethirtyeight projects the following states to go blue in November: MA, CT, ME, NH, RI, VT, NY, NJ, MD, DC, DE, PA, MI, IL, WI, MN, IA, CO, NM, CA, WA, OR, HI. ... and the following states to go red: FL, GA, NC, VA, SC, TX, AL, LA, MS, MO, TN, KY, OK, AR, WV, OH, IN, KS, NE, ND, SD, AZ, NV, UT, ID, MT, WY, AK. With that state-by-state breakdown in hand, we examined the latest AP poll, point-by-point, to see how many votes went to blue state vs. red state college football teams. The result? A red landslide -- 78.7 percent to 21.3. That would make the FBS' power structure 29.4 percentage points more red than the U.S.' Here's the full breakdown of the votes: Red State AP Votes (Total: 16,615, or 78.7 percent): Florida: 1,981 (UF 1,438, USF 493, FSU 50) Texas: 1,952 (Texas 1,100, Texas Tech 845, TCU 6, Rice 1) Alabama: 1,932 (Auburn 1,067, Bama 865) Georgia: 1,539 (Georgia 1,525, Georgia Tech 14) Oklahoma: 1,472 (OU 1,458, Oklahoma State 11, Tulsa 3) Missouri: 1,336 (Mizzou) Ohio: 1,347 (OSU) Louisiana: 1,231 (LSU) North Carolina: 1,167 (East Carolina 762, Wake 404, UNC 1) Kansas: 825 (KU) Utah: 795 (BYU 537, Utah 258) Arizona: 746 (ASU 744, Arizona 2) West Virginia: 163 (WVU) South Carolina: 75 (Clemson 73, South Carolina 2) Idaho: 22 (Boise State) Tennessee: 22 (Tennessee 15, Vandy 7) Kentucky: 6 (UK) Virginia: 4 (Va. Tech) Blue State AP Votes (Total: 4,510, or 21.3 percent): California: 2,212 (USC 1,577, Fresno State 290, Cal 195, UCLA 150) Wisconsin: 910 (Wisconsin) Oregon: 616 (Oregon) Pennsylvania: 607 (PSU) Illinois: 164 (Illinois) Connecticut: 1 (UConn) One major similarity between college football and politics that's revealed here: Without California, the AP's blue-state group, as well as the Democrats, would be nowhere. The country has trended somewhat blue since the 2004 election, when George W. Bush won 53.2 percent of the Electoral College vote, at 286-251. Yet college football has actually gone in reverse, becoming slightly more red in 2008 versus 2004 -- even though in 2004, there were three more states in the "red" category: Colorado, New Mexico and Iowa. In '04 the FBS was just 24.2 percentage points more red than the country as a whole. At the same point in the 2004 college football season (two weeks in), <a href="http://sports.espn.go.com/ncf/rankingsindex?seasonYear=2004&weekNumber=4&seasonType=2">the poll votes</a> were distributed as such: Red State AP Votes (Total: 16,336, or 77.4 percent): Florida: 3,411 (Miami 1,398, Florida State 1,058, Florida 955) Oklahoma: 1,569 (OU 1,522, Oklahoma State 47) Georgia: 1,524 (Georgia 1,478, Georgia Tech 46) Louisiana: 1,344 (LSU) Texas: 1,331 (Texas 1,311, TCU 20) West Virginia: 1,087 (WVU) Ohio: 1,030 (Ohio State) Tennessee: 884 (Tennessee 798, Memphis 86) Virginia: 812 (UVa) Alabama: 790 (Auburn 739, Troy 31, Alabama 20) Utah: 699 (Utah) Iowa: 665 (Iowa) Indiana: 595 (Purdue 557, ND 38) Idaho: 201 (Boise State) Kentucky: 153 (Louisville) Kansas: 51 (K-State) North Carolina: 44 (NC State) Missouri: 41 (Mizzou) Mississippi: 37 (Southern Miss) Colorado: 27 (CU) South Carolina: 23 (Clemson) Virginia: 13 (Virginia Tech) Arkansas: 5 (Arkansas) Blue State AP Votes (Total: 4,760, or 22.6 percent): California: 3,038 (USC 1,611, Cal 969, Fresno State 454, Stanford 4) Michigan: 577 (Michigan) Wisconsin: 404 (Wisconsin) Maryland: 393 (Maryland) Minnesota: 340 (Minnesota) Massachusetts: 8 (Boston College) Florida, it turns out, was not only the most powerful state in the 2004 Presidential election, it was the most powerful state in college football's red/blue split. This was at a point when Miami, Florida State and Florida were all still powerhouses, and the Sunshine state was the unquestioned epicenter of D-I football. And just as Florida has lost it stronghold on the gridiron -- California, Texas, Alabama and Georgia are all challenging for supremacy -- it has lost its linchpin status in the general election. According to <a href="http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/">fivethirtyeight</a>, the four biggest tipping-point states for Obama and McCain in '08 are Colorado, Michigan, Ohio and Virginia ... with Florida coming in fifth. 1215

Luke Winn

New York 4563