Articles of war
The CFB Imperialism map is college football played as Risk on real county lines. Every week's results move land between programs, and the map replays every battle from 1869 to the 2026 season. The concept is u/nbingham196's; this site is an independent, automated implementation of it.
Before a down is played, every county in the fifty states is dealt to the FBS program with the nearest stadium, measured as the crow flies from the county's geographic center to the stadium. Nobody in the FBS starts landless; nobody outside it starts with anything. Membership is taken season by season, so a program that moved up to FBS seeds land from its first FBS year.
When a game goes final, the winner takes everything the loser holds at that moment: home soil and every earlier conquest alike. Games are replayed in kickoff order, so an empire can rise and fall inside one Saturday. Ties, unfinished games and games without a score move nothing.
A team with no land has nothing to lose, but it can beat any landholder and take the lot. That is how FCS, Division II and Division III programs raid their way onto the map, and land taken downward can stay there all season. A landless loser gives up nothing, so beating one is not a conquest.
The measurements
Counties come from the US Census through the us-atlas topology, and the map you see is that same geometry projected Albers-style with Alaska and Hawaii inset. Territories such as Puerto Rico are off the map. Square miles are planar estimates from that 10m geometry: good for a leaderboard, not for surveying.
Stadium coordinates, team colors and logos are today's. Conference and division for a season come from that season's results, so Idaho seeds land as an FBS team in 2014 and appears as an FCS raider later.
A timeline position is the number of battles replayed; every position is a real moment in the season, which is why every record in the almanac and every battle on a team page can link straight to it.
The data
Scores, schedules, pregame Elo and excitement indexes come from CollegeFootballData, one request per day for the whole national slate. The current map refreshes every morning in season, normally within a day of games going final; there are no live in-game updates.
Upset tags use the standard Elo expectation from CFBD's pregame ratings. The battle of the week is the game with the highest excitement index among those that moved land. Neutral-site games such as the Dublin kickoff are labelled but do not award foreign soil.
Every season since 1869 is in the archive; all-time records count seasons with at least a hundred seeded programs, from 1916, because before that a few Eastern schools held the entire map.