Sunday, November 02, 2008
The RPI is Dead
Beginning this season, I am no longer providing RPI data. Over the last few seasons my focus has been on team evaluation and predicting future performance. The RPI is so-so at assisting with the former and less useful at the latter and I basically ignored it in favor of the other information produced here. This wasn’t such a big issue because producing the RPI was easy as the press of a button for me, and as a reward it produced a ton of traffic. One of the big reasons for the exposure of the more sophisticated work on my site was that people were already dropping by for the RPI so there was a reason to keep it around.
However, over the last couple of seasons as my e-mail continued to be dominated with questions on why the RPI equation is like this, or what would the RPI look like if my team did this, my lack of interest in responding to these questions became a problem. When on multiple occasions last season, coaches from power conferences had these questions (or actually thought I created the RPI and was the official source for it) it occurred to me that I would better off without this information on my site. If you are still interested in tracking the RPI, there are about a billion other places to find it during the season. For now, I have RPI data for seasons prior to 2009 still available on the site, but I can’t guarantee that will continue through the season as I look to streamline operations.