Niners-Cowboys will be battle of teams located far from their city namesakes
This weekend's playoff game will be a showdown between the historic NFL cities of...Santa Clara and Arlington?
The following tweet from Jay Cuda got a lot of traction on Twitter the other day. He posted a graph that showed NFL stadium locations in relation to the teams’ downtown areas.
That inspired me to create a couple vizzes1 of my own showing how far away each NFL team plays from the city centers of what would be considered their home towns.
Overall, the San Francisco 49ers win the trophy for farthest drive to their home stadium. It’s a whopping 36 miles from San Francisco along the peninsula down to Santa Clara, California where Levi’s Stadium is located. In fact, the 49ers play two whole counties away from the city of SF. When the Raiders were in Oakland they played closer to San Francisco than did the Niners.
The Cowboys are second on the list with a 19-mile drive from downtown Dallas to AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas. This means Sunday’s divisional round playoff game will be between the two teams who play farthest from their cities.
They’re followed by the New England Patriots whose Gillette Stadium digs in Foxborough, Massachusetts are about 18 miles away from the Boston city center.
The Titans and Vikings are considered the closest teams to their city centers since their stadiums are in the heart of downtown. There are other teams like the Falcons, Colts, Panthers, Seahawks and Ravens who are all around the general downtown area in their cities as well.
I computed distances between a team’s stadium and city center using their longitude and latitudinal coordinates using the Haversine formula2.
An example of two stadiums on the opposite end of the distance-to-downtown spectrum are the Bears’ Soldier Field in Chicago3 and the aforementioned Levi’s Stadium in the South Bay Area. Soldier Field butts up against Lake Michigan on the east and tall skyscrapers on the west. Meanwhile Levi’s Stadium sits in a giant parking lot that is shared with Santa Clara’s Great America.
While Niners fans can say they are tops in the league in driving distance they also hope they can take home a more important piece of hardware this season: the Lombardi Trophy. Their playoff journey continues this weekend against the Arlington Dallas Cowboys in Santa Clara.
I didn’t know how to do this before asking ChatGPT, the OpenAI chat bot that is all the rage right now, the following question: “How do I calculate distance in miles between two sets of decimal degree coordinates using R programming language?” The results were exactly what I needed. It told me that the way to calculate the distance between two points on a sphere (such as the Earth) based on their longitudes and latitudes is to use the Haversine formula: d = 2 * R * asin(sqrt(sin^2((lat2 - lat1) / 2) + cos(lat1) * cos(lat2) * sin^2((lon2 - lon1) / 2))) and proceeded to give the R code to do it. The latitude and longitude coordinates were sourced from a combination of latlong.com, simplemaps.com and google.
The Bears are exploring options of moving to the Chicago suburb Arlington Heights, which is about 26 miles away from the city center. That would put them second on this list.