NFL Team Locations

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This map shows the locations of all the NFL teams. As you can see most of the teams are based in the Eastern side of the USA. There is also a high concentration of teams in the north east region. States with three NFL teams are Florida and California. States with two NFL teams are New Jersey (despite both teams being called New York), Maryland, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas.

Amazingly in Florida there are nine teams within the four major American sports (football, baseball, ice hockey and basketball) this leads to a number of low attendances - Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Miami Dolphins were both within the five lowest average attendances in the NFL for 2011.

Another obvious observation is the high number of NFL teams based on the east coast of America. One reason for this is that 150 million of the 305 million people in America live in the eastern time zone. The time zone raises another important point - western time zone prime time games don't start until 8pm eastern (ET). However, as a fan of NFL in Ireland I have no sympathy for any eastern based fans complaining about late games when the earliest game starts at 6pm GMT (1pm ET).

In my next post I hope to look at home field advantage and players hometowns - which areas produce the most NFL players and the most elite NFL players.