NCAA Football: Common Opponents

The reality of college football is that teams go every season without playing the vast majority of other schools out there. So how can you ever begin to compare them? This application tries to help answer that question by showing common opponents between teams in a visibly appealing and informational format. You can think of this app as the college football version of the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.

To put it another way, if you want to compare Oregon and Oklahoma, select each team from the drop-down list on the left, decide whether you want a simple search (less results, faster) or not and click the ‘find’ button. When you get the results back, you’ll see multiple teams per row. For Oregon/Oklahoma, you may see Oregon, New Mexico, Texas Tech and Oklahoma. This can be read as Oregon played New Mexico who played Texas Tech who played Oklahoma.

Search results are returned with the least degrees of separation first/most direct relationship/least amount of teams per row. For each row, there is a line connecting the teams. This line represents a future or already played game. A gray line represents future games whereas games already played are blue and red. The blue portion of the line connects to the winning team while the red line connects to the losing team. The score is displayed above this.