There are, of course, cases in many metro areas where the juxtaposition of several large counties next to each other will force splits even if every county is under the limit for a district. (And, of course, if the maximum allowed deviation is small enough, then the minimum number of county splits can just be equal to the number of districts minus 1).
For example, just to pick something easy and early in the alphabet, Arapahoe County has several exclaves that are entirely surrounded by the City of Denver, so since the population of Denver plus Arapahoe is much larger than a district, a split is mandatory. In fact, even if you ignore those exclaves (either by thinking of them as part of Denver, or as separate counties), a split is still mandatory, since Denver is entirely surrounded by large counties which, when added to Denver, would force a split.
So this list should be thought of as an unachievable lower bound, that in practice will suggest lower numbers than are actually possible in most states.
Yes indeed. what I'm showing here are the the counties that exceed the population of a congressional district in that state. I'm showing you in any situation the least amount of splits that is possible for a congressional district. Of course when you draw them all in that state the least number of splits for every county can't be achieved. But in any instance without worrying about other districts any of the lowest number of splits for all the counties mentioned can be achieved in some way. So its all the possible lowest amount of splits when drawing individual districts without any others, I'm not really taking into affect the whole state and its connection. I hope you get what I'm trying to say here.