Football network theory

I don’t know crap about football. But I do recognize interesting algorithms when I see them, and this is some of the finest football-related math I’ve seen in some time: Two researchers at the University of Michigan have used network theory to design an alternative ranking system for college football.

Currently, inter-university football competition is a strangely balkanized affair. Unlike as with baseball or basketball, there is no single ranking for all teams; they’re broken into conferences, one of which is selected each year to be the “bowl” championship. But the problem here is that teams don’t get a chance to be evenly measured against one another. As the authors note in their paper (PDF here):

One often hears sports fans arguments of this form: “Although my team A didn’t play your team C this season, it did beat B who in turn beat C. Therefore A is better than C and would have won had they played a game.” (See Fig. 1.) In fact, this argument is usually articulated with less clarity than this and more beer, but nonetheless we feel that the general line of reasoning has merit.

So they essentially wrote a computer algorithm that would crunch game stats for the last couple of years and rank the teams according to precisely that idea: If A beats B and B beats C, A is thus superior to C, even if they never play. When they checked their results against the actual team results, they i) produced the funky graphic seen above, but more importantly, ii) found that their technique did a better job of predicting actual victors than the annual poll currently conducted by the Associated Press.

It’s Miller Time.

(Thanks to Samuel Arbesman for this one!)


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I'm Clive Thompson, a writer on science, technology, and culture. This blog collects bits of offbeat research I'm running into, and musings thereon.

Currently, I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired magazine. I also write for Fast Company and Wired magazine's web site, among other places. Email or AOL IM me (pomeranian99) to say hi or send in something strange!

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January 31, 2010 » 07:29 PM
V. A. To me death seems to be an evil.
M. What, to those who are al­ready dead? or to those who must die?
A. To both.
M. It is a mis­ery, then, be­cause an evil?
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January 24, 2010 » 03:22 PM

One of the more interesting trends is family, which came in at number five. Specifically, discussion about family, moms, dads, daughters, etc. jumped during 2009. With Facebook users getting older, this isn’t a big surprise. However, the fact that the mention of “kids” jumped by a factor of five this year is rather dramatic. It’s tough to know what this means, though. (via Facebook Unveils Most-Mentioned Topics of 2009

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January 15, 2010 » 01:36 PM

BEYOND AWESOME. They are announcing a recall of the Plush Uterus “due to a potential choking hazard for children”. To apply for it, “Please send an email to the address below with the subject line, ‘UTERUS OPT OUT’”.

January 14, 2010 » 10:04 PM

“To order, please TYPE “YES” IN CHECKBOX BELOW TO AGREE YOU UNDERSTAND THIS PLUSH MUST BE KEPT AWAY FROM KIDS (it is a sex organ, after all). If it is not checked, WE WILL NOT SEND THE UTERUS.” (via @ibogost)

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I watched Space: 1999 back in the day, but I swear to god I do not remember this scene.

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