INGLEWOOD, Calif. — With a defending champion and an unforeseen cinderella squaring off in the College Football Playoff National Championship game, the Georgia Bulldogs come into Monday night's game as heavy favorites against TCU.
Despite the Dawgs opening up the big game as gigantic 13.5 point favorites, a newly released map Wednesday from BetOnline shows the majority of the nation is actually rooting for the underdog Horned Frogs to pull of the massive upset.
The online sports gambling platform gathered its map results by using geotagged Twitter data from each team's Saturday night matchups in their respective CFP semifinal games -- a Georgia win over Ohio State and a TCU victory over Michigan.
They tracked over 110,000 tweets using the hashtags #GoDawgs for UGA and #GoFrogs for TCU in addition to popular hashtags #DawgNation or #NattyFrogs in order to determine which states had the majority of the support for each respective team last weekend. The results of that map can be seen below.
As you can see, America is fairly split on the results and has the trend of being somewhat divided down the middle of the country. Although the East Coast is made up of more states in support of the Dawgs, the entire West Coast is painted in purple in support of TCU.
The entire Southeast is behind their SEC family, sans the state of Alabama who still might not be quite over their defeat at the hands of the Dawgs in the 2021 CFP title game.
We also know that the state of Michigan painted in red might be a little misleading considering almost all Wolverines fans were rooting against their arch rival Ohio State on Saturday, and were likely cheering for UGA.
In the end, TCU is the people's national champion as they own support from six more states than UGA, outpacing the Dawgs there 28 to 22.
That result isn't quite shocking, however. Georgia is just coming off a national championship win while TCU goes for their first title since 1938 -- or 85 years. The nation quite often resides with the fellow underdog when true rooting interests are putting aside.
Despite all that purple coming from California, Inglewood's magnificent SoFi Stadium should be dressed up in a whole lot of red come Monday night.