A Bit More about RPI's
Publication Date: September 18, 2001
A Few Things I've Wondered About
This one's going to be a bit short, but it'll pay off in the long run.
That's because I spent my baseball time this week going over the numbers in
the official NCAA RPI report for 2001. It was released a couple of weeks
ago and has made its way into the press, and I actually managed to get a
copy this time. Many thanks to the kind soul who passed a copy along;
I'll keep his name quiet so we can pretend there's some intrigue at work
here, since the NCAA occasionally makes noises about keeping some things
private. I don't know of an online source for it for free, although
Baseball America apparently
has a copy in their subscriber's section.
Having spent that time didn't produce all that much that any but the most
hardcore of you would be interested in, but it did mean that next year I
should be able to come very close to duplicating the exact numbers. I may
go back and re-run past years for posterity, since there's nothing magic
about the numbers I have out there now. I was actually fairly close already;
most of the places where I thought I was off were actually a case of looking
at the wrong point in the season for comparison. A few high points (some of
these will make more sense if you've read the
official RPI document):
- It turns out that the NCAA does not count neutral-site games as road
games for the purposes of determining the bonus factors. There's no reason
that they should, of course; it was just unclear to me. In addition, all
regional and super-regional games are considered neutral-site, regardless
of whether the home team is involved.
- Games against provisional and transitional Division I teams are counted
against a team in computing the penalty for playing non-D1 teams. This is
mildly significant in a few cases; their three games against Cal-Riverside
cost Cal-Santa Barbara the difference in about #24 or so and the #28 they
actually ended up in the final rankings. Given that they would have been
around #20 in the selection-time rankings, that could potentially have
changed their postseason placement. I've written
before about how hard the rules on new teams are to follow; at least
twice last year I was told by SID's or assistant coaches that they had
been assured (although it's unclear whether by the NCAA or the opposing
coaches) that games against Riverside or Lipscomb, for example, would not
count against them. Someone should probably be upset about this.
- The bonus for beating a top 75 team on the road (and the corresponding
penalty for losing to a bottom 75 team at home) is .0012, going to .0018
for the top 50 and .0024 for the top 25. This doesn't matter a huge amount,
but it was the reason that Fullerton passed Stanford for the #2 spot, for
example. It appears that there's probably a programming error and the
bottom 75 actually has 76 teams in it, although I could be misinterpreting
it.
- More teams than I realized are affected by the limit of four games
against non-Division I opposition; a quick count shows around 50 teams
were penalized for going over that. It appears that the first game
costs you .0025, with a sliding scale dropping off after that.
If you are, of course, hardcore enough to want more details, let me know,
and I'll see what else I can dig up, but that's about it.