Out-of-state Google Searches for each NFL team

Where each team is most popular outside their home state? Or “The tale of Brady’s widows”.

Source: NYT

I’ve been following the NFL for quite some time and I thought of exploring the interest each team draws in the US, and one easy source of data to answer this kind of question is definitely Google Trends. Using a package called gtrendsR available in CRAN, you’re able to retrieve Google Trends interest data in the blink of an eye.

Data was obtained from Google Trends concerning Google searches in the last 12 months for each team in the NFL, except in their home state. Visualizations were built with R using GGplot and its family of packages.

Here are some choropleth maps for interest in each time in the last twelve months, split between AFC and NFC:

Medium kinda killed the quality of those images, but here are both in better definition: AFC and NFC