Crunching the college football numbers

College football suffers from what mathematicians call a transitivity problem. Just because Team A beats Team B and Team B beats Team C doesn’t mean Team A will beat Team C. So human voters need help determining which team is the best, and that is where Furman math professors John Harris and Kevin Hutson enter the picture.  The two helped writer Peter Keating, a senior writer with ESPN the Magazine, come up with the numbers to challenge the conventional BCS wisdom.  The article appeared in the Dec. 24 issue of the magazine.