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Post by The Bofa on the Sofa on Sept 5, 2006 7:24:27 GMT -5
So two weekends into the season, I'm wondering, how close are we to having all teams connected in some way? I'm talking about things like
Comparing A vs D
A played B B played C C played D
Which would make the connection.
I have to be out of town again today, but here is your challenge: is there a connection between UCLA and Penn St?
How about USC and, say, UConn?
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Post by FreeBall on Sept 5, 2006 8:45:41 GMT -5
. . . here is your challenge: is there a connection between UCLA and Penn St? Not quite the same as your example, but does this work? Penn State played E. Kentucky (PSU 3-0) E. Kentucky played W. Illinois (E. Kentucky 3-0) W. Illinois played Cinncinati (Cinncinati 3-0) Cinncinati played UCLA (UCLA 3-1)
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Post by Ye Olde Dawg on Sept 5, 2006 10:11:00 GMT -5
Finding the connection may be fairly difficult, but at this point in the season I believe the probability that there's actually some subset of the NCAA Division I that's only played each other is vanishingly small. However, it's very hard for this old math major to figure out just what the odds are - given the fact that so many teams load up their preseason schedule with tournaments. If anyone wants to start a thread to try actually working out the math, let me know. There's a term of roughly (320^N) / (320^(n*something)); I know that much. I *think* that the "something" is greater than 2, but I haven't worked it out yet. Meanwhile, you're going to know by evening when you're done crunching all those numbers, right? So let's let the spreadsheet tell us.
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Post by FreeBall on Sept 5, 2006 10:51:55 GMT -5
How about USC and, say, UConn? This one wasn't quite as easy (and there could be a more direct connection that I didn't detect): USC played Fresno St. (USC 3-0) Fresno St. played LMU (LMU 3-1) LMU played Utah Valley St. (LMU 3-1) Utah Valley St. played Weber St. (Weber 3-0) Weber St. played Gonzaga (Gonzaga 3-2) Gonzaga played UConn (UConn 3-0) BTW: Thanks for motivating me to register with RichKern.com! You can't beat his site for this kind of research.
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Post by The Bofa on the Sofa on Sept 5, 2006 19:19:30 GMT -5
Super kudos to freeball for finding these.
It does appear that there are already connections between some teams of interest. Not necessarily strong, and, of course, it is very early so there may not be all the connections we need. But I am surprised to see them show up.
Thus, I can say the Pablo top 25 look like this (UConn? Didn't see that one coming.)
1 Penn State 2 USC 3 UCLA 4 UConn 5 Santa Clara 6 Nebraska 7 Oregon 8 New Mexico State 9 Texas 10 BYU 11 Florida 12 Michigan 13 Arkansas 14 Stanford 15 Utah 16 Sacramento State 17 LSU 18 Oklahoma 19 California 20 Wisconsin 21 Ohio State 22 Purdue 23 Iowa State 24 Tennessee 25 Illinois
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