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Publication Date: September 17, 2002
That Time of Year
I'm going to spare you all a rant this week, even though I'm scheduled for one. Baseball America just released their annual release of the official NCAA RPI, but, frankly, I just can't work up the venom to rave about the inaccuracies in them. Go read an old one if you need to; a few of the team names have changed, but the picture hasn't. Part of it is that you don't really want to hear it again; part of it is that the pseudo-RPI's are much closer to the real ones than they used to be (although not identical, oddly enough; I'm going to have to do some more work to see if they're slightly changing the formula each year).
There was an interesting note in a BA cover article that I won't bother linking to because it's in the subscriber area. It describes a recent meeting between Jim Wright, the NCAA's Director of Statistics, and the Mountain West coaches, including Tony Gwynn and Vance Law. Basically, Wright was encouraging them to improve their schedules in order to improve their RPI. In principle, that's fine. In practice, though, the MWC schools already play decent if not great schedules (BYU's ranked 68th last year, for example, by my measures). What they don't play are schedules that work well with the RPI's. In other words, Wright is indirectly encouraging them to do the things that I talked about explicitly in my piece last year on gaming the RPI rather than actually improve their schedules, and that leads into what I want to look at this week -- whether those schedulability factors I described worked well as a predictor for who the RPI would overrate or underrate.
Doomed before They Began
In this column, I listed the teams most likely to be overrated by the RPI based on the schedulability factors of their opponents, based on 2001 results. The main question was whether 2001 results would relate well enough to 2002 results for those predictions to be accurate. Here are the ten teams most likely to be overrated based on their schedules, with their final rank in the pseudo-RPI and ISR:
Team RPI ISR Delaware 44 100 Temple 201 219 Quinnipiac 274 278 Albany 209 238 Massachusetts 165 209 Boston College 73 137 Hartford 217 244 Arkansas-Pine Bluff 253 259 St. Peter's 264 269 Northeastern 163 207
Most of these show that being overrated isn't enough when you're also bad, but it's striking that every single one of them ranked higher in the RPI's than in the ISR's. Other significant teams in the top 20 were Rutgers (#45 RPI, #91 ISR), Seton Hall (#106 RPI, #161 ISR), and Elon (#49 RPI, #76 ISR).
How about the other end? Here are the ten I listed as most likely to be underrated:
Team RPI ISR Gonzaga 170 94 Pepperdine 159 85 Portland 197 110 Santa Clara 191 97 Oregon State 88 42 San Diego State 89 43 St. Mary's 204 119 Cal Poly 91 58 San Diego 87 39 Oral Roberts 133 70
You know, even I didn't expect it to be this striking -- again, every single one of these teams, which this method predicted as soon as I had their full schedule without taking into account any of this year's results to be underrated by the RPI's, were underrated by a significant amount. If you've gotten lost in the math and the links (or in that last sentence), the short version of this is that you can predict that a team will be substantially underrated just from looking at their schedule and their opponents' RPI numbers from the previous year, knowledge that could have been quite useful to the two San Diego teams last year, for example.
I'm not sure how much of a breakthrough it is to know that the RPI is flawed in predictable ways. I still stand by the statement that I made in the original gaming column that I don't want to see anyone intentionally using this information; I think if enough teams do it, it could do substantial damage to the game as a whole as some good teams have trouble scheduling good opposition. Nonetheless, I'm increasingly convinced that the RPI's got to go, and pointing these things out is one of the only ways I know of to work toward that. I'm also in the process of formulating a suggested replacement; more on that in future months.
This Year's Schedulability Factors
Here are this year's ten most schedulable teams:
Rank SF WP OWP ISR Team 1 0.0137 0.804 0.441 100.2 Southern 2 0.0131 0.745 0.489 103.2 Marist 3 0.0128 0.803 0.519 113.6 Richmond 4 0.0128 0.679 0.488 99.6 Maine 5 0.0128 0.678 0.362 93.1 Delaware State 6 0.0127 0.698 0.367 96.0 St. Bonaventure 7 0.0127 0.596 0.414 88.8 Central Connecticut State 8 0.0127 0.588 0.451 89.8 Monmouth 9 0.0126 0.627 0.436 93.5 Manhattan 10 0.0125 0.686 0.430 100.5 Pittsburgh
And here is the whole list.
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| Boyd's World-> Breadcrumbs Back to Omaha-> Schedulability Revisited | About the author, Boyd Nation |