Geographic Variance

First of all, HUGE thanks to reader, Stephen O’Connell for putting this together. O’Connell is a professor at Central Arkansas who got curious about what the polls ESPN has been putting out truly represented.

His explanations are below as well as a commentary from him after the jump. The per state voting was extremely interesting and how about a big shout out to all our Cowboys voting (and reading) in Washington D.C.!

Click the photo to enlarge it.

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Obviously, the wishes of the ESPN voters were not met, and I don’t know that the analysis is really all that surprising, but there were some things of interest. When you normalize the recorded vote data by state using the population between 16 and 65 (that’s me making an assumption about the majority of internet users), you can certainly tell which states really had a strong feeling about the subject.

I termed that the ‘passion coefficient’ (which, I’m sure, can find other applications). I find it interesting that, based on those numbers, Washington, DC, had the highest ‘passion’ for this subject. I’m not at all certain why that is… perhaps the DC Pokes Alumni group flooded ESPN.com.

When you multiply that passion coefficient with the recorded margin of support for OSU in the game against LSU, you find that while the support for OSU was broad it was shallow the farther you get from Oklahoma (again, with DC as the exception). LSU fans wanted to see us in the game and the Cornhusker fans must still have some fondness for their former conference.