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The NCAA generated over $1 billion in revenue last year and there’s no doubt March Madness played even more of a role in their profits than the whole “not paying players but happily using their likeness to make money off of them” thing. They’ll attempt to surpass this number this year with two highly-anticipated Final Four matchups this weekend, with the first featuring a team looking to play for the National Championship as an 11-seed and the second starring two top-ranked teams who are sure to inspire at least one guy who still cares about his bracket to worry too much.
As is tradition, each team comes with at least one inspirational story that will be flogged to death by the media (I’m being metaphorical, but I just want to say Sister Jean should not be exposed to this much stress). As a result, plenty of people from around the country will have a short but emotional fling they’ll soon forget, while others who are married to a school experience a celebration normally reserved for their birthday.
To track who people will be giving their heart to this weekend, SportsBetting.ag combed through recent Twitter data to A) find out which fans in each state are supporting the remaining teams based on positive tweets about them and B) subtly remind you someone is always watching.
Here are the results of the more than 260,000 tweets that were analyzed.
SportsBetting.ag
As you’d expect, every team dominated its region, but third-seeded Michigan seems to be the favorite in the Electoral College—including wins in Florida and Ohio (there’s no info regarding the popular vote). However, being the favorite in New Hampshire and Iowa could position Loyola-Chicago to make a great run in the primaries.
That analysis might not have to do anything with who will actually win the games, but I guess this map doesn’t either. We’ll see how things turn out when we tip off on Saturday night.