Does this make sense to you? The following map doesn’t make you the least bit uncomfortable? Really?

Before you utilize the power of online anonymous commenting to tell me how much of an idiot I am, please reconsider. This is a league where the Big Ten has fourteen teams and the Big 12 has ten teams. And you think the conferences are perfect the way they are?

There is a better way. An easier way. For both the fans and the teams.

We have machine learning techniques that allow us to realign the divisions with an eye towards geographical rationality. K-Means Clustering is a type of clustering algorithm which can be used to ‘group’ things into nearby regions.

I’ll leave you with the results in the below infographic. Choose a number of conferences and see the resulting alignment from the algorithm. Choose 4, 8, or 16 and you have a ready-made playoff structure. Choose 10 to realign our current ten conferences in a more rational way.

Thoughts?

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Hawaii broke the algorithm so they get their own lonely conference of one.

You can find the files used for the map at the following GitHub repository.