The geography of champions
About Champography
Champography is an independent sports-geography project built around a simple question: when championship seasons are treated as points on the map, where does their geographic center land, and how does that center move as the selected era changes?
What the project does
The site combines verified champion records, historically correct home venues, geodesic math, offline locality resolution, and an interactive timeline. Users can select a structural era or any contiguous span of seasons and see the stored epicenter, trail, champion locations, and geographic spread for that selection.
Why build it
Championship lists are usually presented as tables, trophy counts, or rankings. Those formats show who won, but they do not reveal how the geographic balance of winning changes over time. Champography makes that movement visible without turning it into a claim about fan loyalty, cultural importance, or future performance.
Principles
Reproducible
The public point should be rebuildable from versioned records and a documented algorithm.
Historically grounded
Champions are connected to the home venue and identity that applied in the championship season.
Transparent
Split titles, excluded claims, source conflicts, and coverage limits remain visible.
Fast by design
Historical ranges are precomputed and served as compact static data rather than runtime database queries.
Independent
Advertisers and sponsors do not control calculations, correction decisions, or editorial conclusions.
Expandable
The shared engine is designed to support separate pages and policies for additional sports.
Current scope
College football is the first complete public implementation. The current verified release covers the 1992 through 2025 seasons, while the default modern view begins with the BCS in 1998. Earlier college-football history and additional sports will be published only after their champion, venue, and coordinate data meet the same QA standard.
What Champography is not
- It is not an official NCAA, league, conference, school, or team product.
- It is not a ranking of cities, regions, conferences, or fan bases.
- It is not a prediction model unless a feature is explicitly labeled hypothetical.
- It is not a substitute for the official historical record or primary source material.
Roadmap
Planned work includes extending college football to 1869, adding NCAA men's and women's basketball, NFL, NBA, NHL, and MLB pages, improving locality containment with Census and OpenStreetMap polygons, and adding clearly labeled hypothetical championship movement.