The transitive win property is an interesting concept. Essentially, it’s a way of comparing teams through common opponents.
This 507-team college football transitive victory wheel is amazing
Probably the biggest ever made.
Take, for example, Tennessee last season. The Volunteers, ahem, the team Butch Jones proclaimed were “Champions of Life,” lost to Vanderbilt, which proceeded to lose to NC State. Using transitive wins, that means the Wolfpack are now the real Champions of Life.
A user on Reddit’s college football hub decided to create a 507-team “Circle of Suck” for the 2016 season, and it’s quite possibly the biggest transitive victory wheel ever created. (Yes, this is a thing lots of college football fans do online each season. There’s even a site that lets you figure out a way to argue that your Division II team was actually better than Clemson last year, based on nothing but transitive victories.)
The list starts with national champ Clemson and shows the Tigers were the only team to beat Alabama, which beat Washington, and so on, wrapping all the way through the NCAA’s three divisions and including NAIA teams before working back around to Pitt, which was the only team to beat Clemson.
The concept was made popular among college football fans by Matt Hinton at Dr. Saturday many years ago, when he kept track of the ACC Wheel of Destiny, as the ACC itself always seemed to most quickly form a transitive circle in any given season.
This is a pretty cool and fun visual that orchestrates just how chaotic and weird the college football season is as a whole.
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