Will We Always Root For Our Local Teams?

What the "nationalization of American sportscape" tells us about the future of where.

A few of weeks ago – during the height of the college football conference championship games – I was on a flight back to San Diego when the guy next to me started talking about college football. The Texas-Georgia SEC championship game was coming up and he was very excited.

“I’m a huge SEC football fan,” he said.

I figured he had gone to Alabama or Georgia or maybe even UT but that wasn’t the case.

“I’ve lived in San Diego my whole life,” he said. “I just like the way they play in the SEC. They’re not afraid to hit each other.”

In other words, the guy’s allegiance was to a particular type of football that he liked and not – as has been common for more than a century – to a team associated with a particular geographical place.

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As we get ready to watch the battle tonight between Notre Dame and Ohio State, this “nationalization” of what has come to be known as the sportscape is worth paying attention to. Tonight’s championship game will be more than just a game game between two great teams. It’ll be a game between two different geographical recruiting philosophies. Notre Dame has always been a “national” team – and that’s a trend that’s growing as the sportscape nationalizes. Ohio State is still a “regional” team – and that’s an approach that’s gradually going away.

To be sure, the fan bases of both college and professional teams are still closely tied to geography, as this graphic of NFL fans from Vividseats shows. But this historically close geographical link between fans and teams may be breaking down as sports becomes more national. And like the nationalization of other elements of our society – politics, media, consumer brands – this trend could change the future of where by changing our relationship with the places we live.

The Geography of College Football Recruiting

Notre Dame has always been a national football team, recruiting from all over the nation. For many years, in fact, it was the only school that successfully recruited nationally.

It used to be California was the big exporter of college football players – they went all over the country. There’s a wonderful story about how Frank Kush, who took over Arizona State in the 1950s, recruited primarily from Los Angeles until his teams got high school kids in Arizona excited about football – and then he started recruiting those Arizona kids instead of kids from California. Kush literally changed the geography of college football recruiting.

And more Notre Dame players still come from California than anywhere else (10 this year). But Notre Dame now recruits heavily from the South. Almost as many Notre Dame players come from the South (36) as from the Midwest itself (41).

This shouldn’t be surprising given recent trends. According to an article by three academics last year in the journal Geographical Review, college football recruiting patterns have shifted dramatically since they were first studied in the 1960. (There’s a surprisingly robust academic literature about the geography of college football recruiting.)

In the ‘60s, California, the Midwest, and the Northeast were big “donor” regions, meaning their homegrown players went all over the country. My Dad, who went to college with the legendary 1960s University of Nebraska football coach Bob Devaney, used to joke that Devaney believed that growing up in New Jersey should not prevent a promising football player from going to college in Nebraska.

Today, Texas, Florida, and Georgia produce more than a third of all college football players. California still produces about 10%, as it did back in the ‘60s. Ohio and Pennsylvania still produce a lot of players, but it’s down significantly from the ‘60s. And New York and Massachusetts have dropped off the list of Top 10 player-producing states.

Source: Thomas Wuerzer, Jeffrey J. Fountain & Peter S. Finley (2024) AN ANALYSIS OF THE GEOGRAPHIC ORIGINS AND MIGRATION PATTERNS OF ELITE COLLEGE FOOTBALL PLAYERS, Geographical Review, 114:2, 157-179 (2024)

Ohio State, meanwhile, has stuck to the more traditional method of recruiting from its home region. Star players, of course, come from all over (and sometimes leave, as proven by the transfer of McCord, who grew up in New Jersey, to Syracuse; he was replaced by Will Howard, who grew up near McCord in Pennsylvania and transferred to Ohio State from Kansas State). But the rank-and-file Buckeye football players still come from Ohio. More than 50 Buckeyes on the current roster – almost half the team – hail from Ohio.

The Nationalization of the American Sportscape

The bottom line about college football is that it’s become much less geographically rooted than it used to be. The South develops football players and exports them to legacy football regions, especially in the Midwest. And, as we have seen, even the major conferences, once geographically bounded, have essentially become nationalized as well.

The Midwestern Big 10 now includes four West Coast teams, which has decimated the Pac 12 (historically the Big 10’s Rose Bowl rival). The Big 12, traditionally bounded by the Plains states, now includes two schools in Arizona one in Utah, and one in West Virginia. The Atlantic Coast Conference has absorbed the major Northeastern schools. And the SEC, while still mostly based in the South, does include Texas, Texas A&M, and Oklahoma.

With star players getting paid a lot of money and moving around through the transfer portal, Midwestern schools tapping Southern talent, and major teams in leagues that are no longer geographical, will our geographical loyalties weaken — and with that, will our connections to community weaken as well?

College football is only one example of the nationalization of what has come to be known as the “sportscape”. Pro football is also moving in this direction, with the rise not only of fantasy football but more recently sports betting. (I’ve often joked that the NFL would probably do just fine if all the teams played all their games in Las Vegas.) And in every professional sport, free agency has broken the traditional relationship between fans and players. Fans may still root for the hometown team, but every few years they have to get used to a new set of players.

Maybe I’m wrong about all this – sports has always been one of the most important ways people connect with their community. But I wonder whether, as we nationalize sports as well as everything else, we’ll begin to see this connection break down and, with it, one way in which we are rooted in the idea of where.