I didn’t mean to start this, but I woke up yesterday morning to a flurry of outraged Twitter users. Some were from Cal, others USC, still others from Oregon. Their only commonality? They all seemed to take exception to something I posted the day before.
I posted a graph that indicated Stanford had more Olympic athletes on Team USA than any other university. The graph I posted had also been covered by Yahoo! Sports and Business Insider. Certainly reputable sources, right?
So, I decided to parse through the data myself, and generate a more accurate graph. Here’s the result:
Stanford is still in first place (by a considerable margin), and the state of California is king (the top four schools are all Californian). Of course, as USC and Cal fans will point out, if we expand beyond Team USA (and include teams from all countries), then Stanford, USC, and Cal are quite close (USC's 43 to Cal's 41 to Stanford's 39). But when it comes to Team USA, Stanford is alone on top, and it's not particularly close.
By the way, if you’re curious how I came up with the graph: I took the official data from TeamUSA.org, where all athletes are identified by school. If more than one school was listed for an athlete, I used whichever school was listed first because this results in a more accurate representation of an athlete’s school since—for example—Lauren Fendrick would be listed under UCLA (where she played 127 volleyball matches) instead of USC (where she went to law school years later and played literally 0 volleyball matches).
In rare instances, however, I found erroneous data entries and corrected them. For instance, even though Missy Franklin swam competitively at Cal for two years, she nonetheless listed her school as "Regis Jesuit High School" (can you blame her for not wanting to affiliate with Cal?). Wherever I caught errors like this, I corrected them (so that Missy Franklin would correctly be listed under Cal).
It’s possible that there are a few other erroneous entries in the TeamUSA official data, so if you catch any other errors, don’t hesitate to let me know in the comments section or on Twitter @CardinalVassar and I’ll happily fix them.
Here is the raw data: