Beware The Midwest Losing Front Coming Through

Mapping the winning percentages the country's teams

By EAMONN BRENNAN

Updated 4:47 PM EST, Thu, Jan 8, 2009

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This morning, our friend Jon Bois put together an interesting map at Mouthpiece Sports Blog. What did Bois map out? Using his unique and incredible brain, he averaged major sports markets' winning percentages (using football, basketball, and baseball; hockey doesn't readily provide percentages on its site) and tried to get a mental idea of which cities and regions were experiencing the most sporting success -- or failure -- these days. As you can see in the top right, his findings bode well for the East Coast, but not so well for the Midwest:

The most striking pattern hovers over the Midwest. Look at all that red. Chicago and Indianapolis are doing well, but they’re surrounded on all fronts by losing markets. Also worth noting is the Eastern Seaboard. Save for Miami and its miserable Heat, every major market on the East Coast is winning, and the trend continues all the way across the Gulf of Mexico. The lesson here, apparently, is to move to the East Coast and stay there. They don’t call it flyover country for nothing.

What does it all mean? Nothing, actually. Fortunately, there is no scientific proof that winning spreads in a similar manner as the weather (as long as you ignore the Big Ten and ESPN's East Coast bias).