HT to my guy Mark who shared this with me. All of Division 1 Men's Basketball combines to have beaten itself! Very interesting and I wonder how many times it's happened before.
Total Division 1 Circle of Suck
Earlier this week, u/Ike348 did the math and found out that Division 1 college basketball has completed a complete "circle of suck" ("doom" for ESPN friends). Well u/Sir_Superman has created the graphic as a "star of suck". https://t.co/0usAp7Giwd pic.twitter.com/Pg1XKh7wVH— /r/CollegeBasketball (@redditCBB) February 4, 2019
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Comments
#goNCAA?
uggh the Penn State game was the one he used. I was hoping for the UNC game, but he only had 3 L's to choose from, so we got that going for us. Which is nice.
Eh, I don't have the numbers on it, but it seems logical that about half the losses on here are "upsets". Like ODU beating VCU, who beat Texas, who beat Kansas, who beat Tennessee.
Syracuse winning at Duke, etc etc etc
I don't know for sure, but I feel like this is actually a lot more likely to happen than one would think. As long as there aren't too many one and two loss teams, I bet the full circle can be created by the end of most regular seasons.
I may be wrong, and I'll probably never do the math to find out, but just my instinct.
(You're probably right, but you're spoiling the fun)
Still absolutely awesome that someone took the time to put it together. I don't know what is more impressive, determining the circle or creating the graphic.
I feel like determining the circle would be the hardest part. Seems like it would be fairly straightforward to create an algorithm that determines a path and places all the logos once you've figured out the circle. Obtaining the logos would be a slight challenge, but if nothing else you could make a bot that would scrape them all from a site such as http://www.sportslogos.net/teams/list_by_league/30/NCAA_Division_I_a-c/N...
I'm putting on my math and computer science geek hat (my research in grad school was on algorithms and network analysis), the feature in question is a well-known one in graph theory known as the Hamiltonian cycle. In a graph (i.e. nodes and edges/connections), it's a cycle (or circle) that touches every single node exactly once, which you'd need for a circle of suck across all D-I teams.
Proving that one even exists for a given graph is NP-complete, and the time required to solve increases exponentially with the number of nodes (teams). I'm always amazed at how much time I know has to go into finding these things for such a large number of teams, especially considering wins and losses make the resulting graph directed as opposed to undirected.
ESPN has a nice little service running for team logos that seems abusable if you know their team id.
https://a.espncdn.com/combiner/i?img=/i/teamlogos/ncaa/500/259.png
https://a.espncdn.com/combiner/i?img=/i/teamlogos/ncaa/500/258.png
it gives you custom sizes too.
https://a.espncdn.com/combiner/i?img=/i/teamlogos/ncaa/500/259.png&h=150..."
https://a.espncdn.com/combiner/i?img=/i/teamlogos/ncaa/500/258.png&h=15&..."
Hmm, that would be quite helpful for a couple random projects that I've been considering but putting off now for years.
Is there a list somewhere of which school has which ID?
I haven't been able to find a simple list anywhere, but I haven't looked too hard. It should be relatively easy to scrape the html of http://www.espn.com/college-football/teams for the links to each team's info page. The team id is built into the url.
eg:
http://www.espn.com/college-football/team/_/id/259/virginia-tech-hokies
http://www.espn.com/college-football/team/_/id/258/virginia-cavaliers
Someone should run this on last year before the tournament
If only because its guaranteed to see VT > UVa
We beat UVa head to head last year, so yeah, it would be pretty easy to have VT > LOLUva
Pretty sure the point he was trying to make was that any potential "circle of suck" prior to the NCAAT would have to include our win over UVA, but he's probably forgetting that they also lost to WVU last year.
I think I've seen this video
The fact of us beating VMI connecting back to Duke is impressive.