The objective of this lab was to come up with a spatial question that could be answered using the tools in ArcMap that I have learned over the past semester. I decided to investigate the question, which cities would be a good place for the next NFL football team? My intended audience includes football fans and members of the corporate offices of the NFL. The people who may be able to use this information would be mayors of the cities in which have been selected as potential candidates for a new football team and NFL Corporate.
Data Sources
I used three different data sources for this lab, the first source was the city data set provided by ESRI in the MagLabs. It contained population data as well as the locations of the cities. The locations of the NFL teams I received from the NFL website, specifically www.nfl.com/teams. The final set of data I used was for the location and amount of passengers that each airport in the U.S.A. I got this data from the online ESRI data sources. Some of the concerns that I have include outdated data, the population information I used is a few years old. The population data was based off of the years 2000 and 2007. As for the NFL data some of the stadiums were located in cities that were not included in the cities data that I acquired, so I used the closet city to it that was included in my data sources.
Methods
To answer this question I set up a list of criteria that I thought would be pertinent in determining which cities should host the new NFL Team.
- Can't already contain a NFL Team
- Be in a state with less then 2 NFL Teams
- Population greater then 250,000
- Population Growth of 1.04% or higher
- 150 miles from a current team
- Most be in a city with an airport that deals with 1.5 passengers a day
To begin I went to the NFL website and found all of the locations of every NFL team and put that data into a mircosoft excel sheet, along with the state abbreviations of each city, a field that contained a 1 and the object ID numbers that ESRI used for the cities in the ESRI data. The field that contains the one is the field that will allow me to select the NFL cities from the rest. The rest of the cities will have "null" in the fields with the 1's. After I got the data table with the NFL teams locations I joined it to the ESRI cities data. After the join was complete I opened the new data table and selected by attributes all cities that contain an NFL team. Next I switched the selection, meaning that instead of having all of the NFL cities I now had all cities without an NFL team. I then created a new layer from all the cities without a NFL team.
For the proceeding step I went back to the NFL cities data and ran a summarize on based on the state abbreviations to find the amount of teams per state. I found that California, Florida, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas all have 2 or more teams. Going back to the data with all cities without a NFL team, I selected by attributes all cities that are located in one of the cities listed above, switched selection again so I had all cities not located in the above states, and created a new layer from selection.
The next two steps were pretty easy. First, from the new layer, I selected by attributes all cities that have a population greater then 250,000 and created a new layer from the selection. I then added a new field labeled "Population Growth". I opened the field calculator and divided the 2007 population from the 2000 population and add the results to the population field. I then selected from attributes all cities that have a population growth of 1.04% or higher.
The next step I had to use a new tool select by location. I opened the select by location tool and made the target layer potential cities for a NFL team and made the source layer current NFL teams. I then set the distance to 150 miles and ran the tool. The results were all of the cities are within 150 miles of a current NFL team, I switched selection and created a layer from selection. I now had all cities that were 150 miles or more from every current city that host a NFL team.
The final step was to add US airports from the online ESRI data sources. I created a buffer around the five remaining cities of 50 miles and saw that 4 of the 5 remaining cities contained a large enough airport. I selected the 4 cities and created a layer from the selection.
The 4 different tools that I used are,
-Join
-Select by Location
-Field Calculator
-Buffer
This is the flow chart that outlines all of the steps that I took to come to my conclusion,
(Flow Chart of the Steps took during my research)
Results
The results that I obtained were that Anchorage Alaska, Oklahoma City Oklahoma, Albuquerque New Mexico, and Las Vegas Nevada were the best candidates for a new NFL Franchise based off of the criteria that I selected.
(The Map of Current and Potential NFL Cities)
Evaluation
I really liked this project, it helped my apply the knowledge that I had learned over the semester without having a step by step list to follow. The biggest challenge that I faced was creating my own data table and have it added to ArcMap to be manipulated to help me answer my question. When you create an excel file and add it to ArcMap only recognizes it as words, which is inconvenient when you need the data to be locations. To over come this problem I joined the data table that I created to a table that ArcMap recognized as locations. If I could redo this assignment I would probably email the NFL corporate to get the criteria that they use instead of basing my study off of areas that I believe will play a factor in the decision.
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