Transitive Football

So the University of Colorado football team lost its first game of the season to Division I-AA Montana State. Montana State promptly lost their next game to Division II Chadron State. The coach of Chadron State subsequently remarked “We're a marked team," meaning that now everybody wants a piece of the team that beat the team that beat big bad CU.

Ok, so there is no Transitive Property of Beating in sports, i.e. that if A beats B and B beats C then A would beat C. For a lot of reasons, which I won’t bother enumerating. But I think it would be an interesting statistics project to determine the correlation between success against common opponents and head-to-head success. I would look at the length of the chain; I would guess that a two game beating chain gives you a good likelihood of winning head-to-head; a three game chain lesser odds, and probably a four game chain means nothing. It would also be interesting to see what the differences are between sports.

By the way, here is a link to a transitive victory calcultor: http://www.cfbanalyzer.com/cgi-bin/chain.cgi. Using it, you can see that in 2005, there was a 19-link chain whereby Chadron State beat Colorado. So I guess some things never change.