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Note: I am not a football fan (really! not in the I am
not a crook sense). Most years I try to watch at least one game from
Penn State,
Mississippi State, and
Troy State because I went to these schools,
and I also try to watch the Auburn vs.
Alabama game because that's what people
from the state of Alabama do (and because I was in the 10th grade
at Auburn High).
OK, so why did I put this together if I'm not a football fan?
A friend who is a football fan (Hi Pat!) was telling me about the BCS'
"strength of schedule" ranking. This led us to discuss whether it
would be possible to compare any two teams. That is, Is there
some path of teams that play teams that play other teams, etc. that could connect
any two teams? In graph theory you asked "is the graph connected?".
The answer is No. NCAA III East has one conference,
NESCAC - New England Small College
Athletic Conference, which plays intra-conference games only. Aside from those
there is a path of games between any two teams. You can see the complete grouping
(i.e. connected components) by clicking the "Connected"
link on the left, or by clicking here.
OK, so the question is answered; what is "Find a Path"?
Not satisfied with knowing the answer to the connectedness question I decided
to write a query to display the shortest game path between two selected teams.
You can click the "Find a Path" link on the left or here to get to the web-ified version of that
query. Note: The shortest path displayed is not necessarily unique. No shorter
path exists but another path of the same length could exist (and because the
games graph is undirected you can always come up with a longer path).
OK, you answered the question and then some. What's everything else?
The other links on the left, "Conferences"
and "Teams" are lists of the conferences and
teams (duh). Most of the time you see a link with the "short name" of the school as
the anchor you can click that link to get that team's 2007 schedule. Not even simple
graph theory here, it's simply dumping SQL results into HTML.
And a final note: Pat was over again a couple of weeks later and asked about
mascot popularity. Great! mascot was part of the data I collected for each school
so a little SQL helps us out. The answers are....
- Tigers (34) - Cool, I was a sophomore at Auburn High (also
the Tigers) while my Mom finished her Ph.D. at Auburn, and my brother teaches
at Auburn now.
- Bulldogs (27) - Also Cool, My M.S. is from Mississippi State.
- Wildcats (19) - Way Cool, I went to middle school in
Manhattan while my Dad was getting his Ph.D at Kansas State.
- Eagles (18) - Oh well, I never lived in an
"Eagles" town so I'll end the list here
A little food for thought: How many schools can you name that have each of these
as their mascot? We couldn't come up with more than 4 schools for any of the
mascots. Someday RSN I'll probably webify the mascots
query (my wife suggested that I put together a mascot trivia game).
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