The Oracle of Notre Dame

Welcome to the Oracle of Notre Dame! Please enter the names of two major college football teams, and the Oracle will find a conference connection between them:

(Here is a list of teams included, with the spellings used.)

Notes

• You can use most of the typical, well-known abbreviations some teams have (for example, BYU for Brigham Young). Some abbreviations are ambiguous; if you enter one, the Oracle will ask you to spell the name out. If you are having trouble entering a team's name, please refer to the list of teams.
• Notre Dame is not in the database, because it's never been in a football conference. (You see, the name of this site is sarcasm.)
• None of the Ivy League schools has ever played football in another conference. Therefore, you cannot connect your school to Harvard or Yale. Sorry.
• Two different teams from the same conference have one degree of separation. You really shouldn't need the Oracle of Notre Dame to tell you the conference connection between Ohio State and Michigan.
• Here are some stats about the Oracle's data set.
• The conference data before 2003 were downloaded from this site, courtesy David Wilson and James Howell. I supplied conference data for 2003 through 2010 myself. The latest change is Western Kentucky, which joined the Sun Belt Conference in 2009.
• Only teams from major conferences are considered. The definition of major is whatever James Howell cared enough about to list in his data sheets.
• Data not guaranteed to be accurate, nor complete.

Links

• The Oracle of Bacon from the University of Virginia, which was the inspiration for this page.
• David Wilson's College Football page
• James Howell's Historical Football Scores
• The home page of the High Priest of the Oracle of Notre Dame, Carl Banks

Page Copyright © 2003-2010 Carl Banks.