{"id":971,"date":"2012-12-20T20:19:50","date_gmt":"2012-12-21T01:19:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/2012\/12\/20\/crunching-the-numbers-for-espn\/"},"modified":"2024-01-26T16:20:44","modified_gmt":"2024-01-26T21:20:44","slug":"crunching-the-numbers-for-espn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/crunching-the-numbers-for-espn\/","title":{"rendered":"Crunching the college football numbers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/newsimg.furman.edu.s3.amazonaws.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/espn-themagazine.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-5113 lazyload\" title=\"espn-themagazine\" data-src=\"http:\/\/newsimg.furman.edu.s3.amazonaws.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/espn-themagazine.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"289\" height=\"350\" src=\"data:image\/svg+xml;base64,PHN2ZyB3aWR0aD0iMSIgaGVpZ2h0PSIxIiB4bWxucz0iaHR0cDovL3d3dy53My5vcmcvMjAwMC9zdmciPjwvc3ZnPg==\" style=\"--smush-placeholder-width: 289px; --smush-placeholder-aspect-ratio: 289\/350;\" \/><\/a>College football suffers from what mathematicians call a transitivity problem. Just because Team A beats Team B and Team B beats Team C doesn&#8217;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.\u00a0 The two helped Peter Keating, a senior writer with <em>ESPN the Magazine<\/em>, come up with the numbers to challenge the conventional BCS wisdom.\u00a0 The article appeared in the Dec. 24 issue of the magazine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>College football suffers from what mathematicians call a transitivity problem. Just because Team A beats Team B and Team B beats Team C doesn&#8217;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.\u00a0 The two helped Peter Keating, a senior writer with\u00a0<em>ESPN the Magazine<\/em>, come up with the numbers to challenge the conventional BCS wisdom. The article appeared in the Dec. 24 issue of the magazine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":265,"featured_media":972,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,6,50],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-971","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academic-department-page","category-in-the-news","category-mathematics"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/971","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/265"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=971"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/971\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/972"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=971"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=971"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=971"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}