The geography of champions
About Champography
Champography is an independent data experiment by @ericatkins. It asks a simple question: if every championship season is placed at the champion's home geography, where does the center land—and how does that center move when the era changes?
What the project does
The site combines championship records, historical home-location evidence, geodesic math, official place-name data, and an interactive timeline. Select a structural era or any contiguous range of seasons to see its epicenter, movement trail, contributing champion locations, and geographic spread.
Why build it
Championship history is usually presented as a list or trophy count. Those views show who won, but not how the geographic balance of winning changed. Champography turns that history into a map while preserving the oddities that make college football interesting: split titles, retrospective selectors, changing postseason systems, and stadium history.
Current scope
College football is the first public implementation. Champion coverage now spans 1869 through the latest completed season, following the NCAA's published FBS championship-history table. The default view remains the Modern Championship Era beginning with the 1998 BCS season.
Early-location limitation: the champion list is complete, but some pre-1992 rows currently use a documented program home-field or historical-site reference rather than a fully verified season-specific stadium center. The downloadable CSV identifies the method and coordinate precision for every record so this limitation is visible and correctable.
Principles
Reproducible
Every public point should be rebuildable from versioned records and a documented algorithm.
Historically grounded
Champions are tied to the identity and home geography applicable to the season, with provisional methods labeled.
Town-level accurate
Small and unincorporated communities matter. Place labels use GNIS populated places and remain qualified when legal containment is unknown.
Auditable
Fans can download championship rows, every derived range, and the locality-change audit as CSV files.
Independent
Sponsors and advertisers do not control calculations, corrections, or editorial conclusions.
Expandable
The shared calculation and publishing contracts are designed to add other sports without rebuilding the product.
What Champography is not
- It is not an official NCAA, CFP, conference, school, league, or team product.
- It is not a ranking of towns, regions, conferences, or fan bases.
- The named town is a geographic reference for the calculated point, not a claim that the town won a championship.
- It is not a prediction model unless a feature is explicitly labeled hypothetical.
Open data and corrections
Champography publishes the data used to build each sport page. The objective is not merely to show a result, but to let other fans inspect the inputs, reproduce the calculation, and point out mistakes. Documented corrections are reviewed, versioned, and released through the same pipeline as a new champion season.
What comes next
The next data work is to harden early college-football venues season by season, then apply the same model to NCAA men's and women's basketball, NFL, NBA, NHL, and MLB championship history. Future analysis may include era comparisons, rolling windows, hypothetical champions, high-resolution exports, and embeddable maps.