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Thursday, March 10, 2005

Breaking RPI News

After seeing the 'team sheet' that Luke Winn posted, the alarm bells sounded in my head (see previous post). But then I read Gregg Doyel's piece this morning, and noticed this...

Until Wednesday, the Pac-10 had been the country's No. 2-rated RPI league for months. Bowlsby himself thought the Pac-10 remained the No. 2 league, referring to that league as second behind the ACC, until Hancock informed him of the change.

The ACC remains No. 1. The Pac-10? It's now fourth. In between are the Big 12 (second) and the Big East (third), which had been third and fourth behind the Pac-10 until Wednesday.

In the computation you have been seeing on my page, the Pac-10 has remained number two all week, and comfortably so. But now I am fairly certain this computation is wrong based on the above the information.

Back in January, when the RPI changes were announced, I mentioned that there were two possible ways for the changes to be applied.

Now that the ingredients have been revealed I will be posting this version of the RPI on the main page. There is one possible bit of confusion. Will they do it the way I tested in that earlier post, or will they do it the way that makes sense? The way I talked about before is to only apply these adjustments to Part I of the RPI. The sensible way is to apply the adjustments to all three parts.

I had no way of knowing which one was correct. I chose to apply it the way that made sense. ESPN and others have done it the same way. It turns out all the lemmings have gone over the cliff on this one.

The RPI is actually being computed the other way. Without independent confirmation from the NCAA - which will never happen - I can't be totally certain. But based on the two pieces of information I have come across over the past 12 hours, I am certain enough to now post data based on the other version of the formula. The way the Pac-10 would be fourth in overall RPI is by applying the home/road adjustment only to the winning percentage portion of the RPI, and not to the SOS factors. [Note: the Pac-10 is still #2 in the average non conference RPI]

So for the last five days of the season, my RPI will differ significantly from what ESPN uses, but it will be nearly identical to what the NCAA people are looking at this week, based on the glimpses that they have let the fans see over the past couple of days.

Posted on 03/10 at 08:03 AM
RPI Fiasco '05 • (2) Trackbacks • Permalink • E-mail me

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