Browns And Bengals Move Over for Steeler Fans!

Facebook has kept track of the number of “Likes” that football fans have and came upon a startling discovery…. there are more Steeler fans in Cincinnati than Bengal fans!   

Here’s an article found in SB Nation …   the article is actually from the Cincinnati Bengals, not the Steelers!!

(Photo by Joe Robbins/Getty Images)

Bengals Fans: Facebook Declares Pittsburgh Steelers As Most “Liked” In Ohio

Of Facebook’s 35 million account holders, one out of ten have declared their allegiance to an NFL franchise. The results may surprise you.

If you’ve ever wanted to know how the Bengals fan base looks when illustrated onto a map of the United States, Facebook has compiled some nifty illustrations based off of data they compiled by tracking “likes” of an NFL team for every Facebook user. Roughly 3.5 million Facebook users have “liked” an NFL team, and Facebook is calling their research “one of the most comprehensive samples of sports fanship ever collected.”

“While winning seems to matter, NFL teams have local followings that are probably heavily influenced by family ties and/or where a person grew up, so we were obviously curious to see where the fans for various teams live now. By considering the physical locations of NFL fans, we can construct a map of the top team for each county in the US. It tells an interesting story about the ways that football rivalries and allegiances alternately divide and unite the country, and sometimes even individual states.”

Now, if you’re even partially colorblind, you may need some help with this one. 32 teams leads to three different shades of orange on this map, but I think we can all conclude which orange is Miami, Denver, and so on. What’s fairly alarming in this map is the fact that Pittsburgh fans override about half of the state of Ohio. In other words, Bengals fans and Cleveland fans collectively tie Pittsburgh fans in the Buckeye State.

Why is that?

There are a few things to consider as we look at a sea of yellow oozing all over the state of Ohio. First, it’s important to mention that Facebook’s conclusions act almost as the Electoral College. The true numbers are taken away and each county is given a sort of winner-take-all scenario. In other words, we don’t really know exactly how many Bengals fans (or Browns fans, for that matter) are “liking” their team. We only know who’s winning over a specific county and therefore getting their pigment on Facebook’s fancy map. Second, naturally geography comes into play. A large portion of western Ohio is closer to Pittsburgh – simple as that. Also, Ben Roethlisberger’s legacy is littered all over the state of Ohio. Rothlisberger was born in Findlay, OH (or Lima, OH depending on which source you believe) where he also attended high school, and he played for three years at the University of Miami in Oxford, OH. See the chunk of yellow in the Northeast? It’s likely that Big Ben’s hometown fans occupy that space.

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