By Bill Turianski on 20 March 2020; twitter.com/billsportsmaps.
Links…
Source: NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament bids by school (en.wikipedia.org).
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With the cancellation of the 2020 NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament, I had some extra space to fill. So I decided to make a map I had wanted to make for years.
The map shows all teams (119 teams) which have qualified for the NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament at least 10 times. On the map, each team’s Total-Appearances is shown in graphic form by a team-colors-circle that radiates out from the team’s location. (Three teams – St. John’s, UConn, and Villanova – have both their venue-locations shown on the map.) The team-colors-circles are sized, with the larger the total appearances, the larger the circle. Alongside each team’s team-color-circle/location-dot/logo is their number of appearances. The team-color-circles are almost all centered on each team’s location-dot…unless I could not fit it in, due to geography and “team congestion”. That happened on the East Coast (in the NYC-metro area, and particularly in Philadelphia, but also in Massachusetts/RI, in DC/Maryland, and with respect to North Carolina/Duke). It also happened on the SF-Bay & LA parts of the California coast, up in the Seattle area, and in the southwest-Ohio/Cincinnati region.
I had to cut it off at 10 appearances. I would have kept going, but it was becoming too hard to fit in teams, and still make the map readable.
At the far-left-hand side of the map-page, I made a long chart, which shows 5 things…
A) Each team’s Tournament Appearances Rank.
B) Name of school and its primary logo (or wordmark) for their Athletics teams.
C) Tournament Appearances (with last appearance noted).
D) Final Four Appearances (with last Final Four noted).
E) Titles (with last title noted).
The map encompasses all 81 seasons of the tournament (1939-2019). The map is based on a list at Wikipedia {NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament bids by school}. I deviated from the list in just one way…Teams which qualified for the 2020 tournament, before the tournament was cancelled on Friday the 13th of March, do not have those 2020 bids count toward their total appearances-tally. I did that because it wouldn’t be fair to all the teams from the bigger conferences that never got to play in their tournaments, or all the teams that would have been selected as at-large bids on selection-Sunday.
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-Thanks to AMK1211 for blank map of USA, ‘File:Blank US Map with borders.svg”>File:Blank US Map with borders.svg‘ (commons.wikimedia.org).
-Thanks to the contributors to the pages at en.wikipedia.org, 2020 NCAA Men’s Division I Basketball Tournament.
