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CFB Stadium Map

Saiem Gilani
@saiemgilani @saiemgilani

Source: vignettes/recipe-cfb-stadium-map.Rmd
recipe-cfb-stadium-map.Rmd
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The brief: the preseason guide wants a map of college football: every FBS program as its logo, sitting on its home stadium, so a reader can find the schools near them, click one for its stadium and capacity, and show one conference at a time. This recipe is new, not the interactive version of a static one. The stadiums come from CollegeFootballData.com through cfbfastR, leaflet draws the map, and sdvplotR’s addSdvLogoMarkers() turns each marker into a team logo.

CollegeFootballData.com needs a free API key in CFBD_API_KEY (get one at https://collegefootballdata.com/key; see ?cfbfastR::register_cfbd). Without one, the code below is shown but not run.

has_key <- nzchar(Sys.getenv("CFBD_API_KEY"))
if (!has_key) cat("CFBD_API_KEY is not set, so the chunks below are shown but not run.\n")
knitr::opts_chunk$set(eval = has_key)
library(sdvplotR)
library(dplyr, warn.conflicts = FALSE)
library(leaflet)
library(ggplot2)

season <- 2025

1. Get the data

cfbd_team_info() returns one row per school, and with only_fbs = TRUE and a year it is that season’s FBS teams with their conference and home venue: stadium name, city, state, latitude, longitude and capacity. No join is needed. CFBD’s team_id is ESPN’s team id, the id sdvplotR keys college teams by, so it goes to the logo functions as it is. That skips name matching, where "Charlotte" alone could be the 49ers or the Saints.

stadiums <- cfbfastR::cfbd_team_info(only_fbs = TRUE, year = season) |>
  as.data.frame() |>
  transmute(
    team = as.character(team_id), school, conference,
    venue = venue_name, city, state, capacity,
    lon = longitude, lat = latitude
  ) |>
  arrange(conference, school)
nrow(stadiums)
#> [1] 136
count(stadiums, conference)
#>           conference  n
#> 1                ACC 17
#> 2  American Athletic 14
#> 3             Big 12 16
#> 4            Big Ten 18
#> 5     Conference USA 12
#> 6   FBS Independents  2
#> 7       Mid-American 13
#> 8      Mountain West 12
#> 9             Pac-12  2
#> 10               SEC 16
#> 11          Sun Belt 14

A popup is HTML, so the text that goes into it is escaped first (Texas A&M has an ampersand):

esc <- htmltools::htmlEscape
stadiums <- stadiums |>
  mutate(popup = sprintf(
    "<b>%s</b><br>%s<br>%s<br>Capacity %s<br>%s, %s",
    esc(school), esc(conference), esc(venue), format(capacity, big.mark = ","), esc(city), state
  ))

2. The map

Start with the logos. addSdvLogoMarkers() reads the coordinates and team ids from the map’s data with formulas, and label is the text shown on hover. A light basemap keeps the logos readable, and fitBounds() frames the continental United States (Hawai’i is off the frame; zoom out to find it).

lower48 <- c(-125, 24, -66.5, 49.5) # west, south, east, north

leaflet(stadiums) |>
  addProviderTiles(providers$CartoDB.Positron) |>
  addSdvLogoMarkers(~lon, ~lat, ~team, league = "cfb", size = 26, label = ~school) |>
  fitBounds(lower48[1], lower48[2], lower48[3], lower48[4])

Hover names the school. Add the popup, and a click opens the stadium details:

leaflet(stadiums) |>
  addProviderTiles(providers$CartoDB.Positron) |>
  addSdvLogoMarkers(~lon, ~lat, ~team, league = "cfb", size = 26, label = ~school, popup = ~popup) |>
  fitBounds(lower48[1], lower48[2], lower48[3], lower48[4])

The Southeast is crowded at this zoom. Put each conference’s markers in its own leaflet group, and addLayersControl() lists the groups with a checkbox each, so the reader can show one conference, or compare two:

stadium_map <- leaflet() |>
  addProviderTiles(providers$CartoDB.Positron)
for (conf in unique(stadiums$conference)) {
  stadium_map <- stadium_map |>
    addSdvLogoMarkers(
      ~lon, ~lat, ~team,
      league = "cfb", size = 26, label = ~school, popup = ~popup, group = conf,
      data = filter(stadiums, conference == conf)
    )
}
stadium_map <- stadium_map |>
  addLayersControl(
    overlayGroups = unique(stadiums$conference),
    options = layersControlOptions(collapsed = FALSE)
  ) |>
  fitBounds(lower48[1], lower48[2], lower48[3], lower48[4])
stadium_map

The map has no data of its own here, so each call passes its conference’s rows with data =, and the formulas read those.

3. Share it

htmlwidgets::saveWidget() writes the map to one HTML file; selfcontained = TRUE inlines leaflet’s JavaScript, so the file opens anywhere. The logos and map tiles stay links, so the file needs the network when it is opened.

html <- tempfile("cfb-stadiums-", fileext = ".html")
htmlwidgets::saveWidget(stadium_map, html, selfcontained = TRUE, title = "FBS stadiums")
round(file.size(html) / 1024) # kilobytes
#> [1] 525

4. The static version

For a print page or a post, draw the same logos with ggplot2 at their longitude and latitude over the state outlines from map_data("state") (it needs the maps package). coord_quickmap() keeps the map’s proportions. Hawai’i is left out to keep the frame on the lower 48.

states <- map_data("state")
mainland <- filter(stadiums, state != "HI")

ggplot() +
  geom_polygon(
    data = states, aes(x = long, y = lat, group = group),
    fill = "grey97", colour = "grey75", linewidth = 0.2
  ) +
  geom_sdv_logos(data = mainland, aes(x = lon, y = lat, team = team), league = "cfb", height = 0.04) +
  coord_quickmap() +
  labs(
    title = paste("Every FBS program at its home stadium,", season),
    caption = "Data: CollegeFootballData.com via cfbfastR | Viz: sdvplotR"
  ) +
  theme_void() +
  theme(plot.title = element_text(face = "bold"))

Map of the lower 48 United States with state outlines and the logo of every FBS college football program in 2025 at its home stadium, dense in the Southeast and Midwest.

Our Authors

Citation

To cite the sdvplotR R package in publications, use:

BibTeX Citation

@misc{gilani_carl_lee_kay_weatherman_sdvplotR,
  author = {Gilani, Saiem and Carl, Sebastian and Lee, Jared and Kay, Camden and Weatherman, Andrew},
  title = {sdvplotR: The SportsDataverse's R Package for Multi-League Sports Plotting.},
  url = {https://sdvplotR.sportsdataverse.org},
  year = {2026}
}