St. Mary's won at Gonzaga. That is absolutely a difference maker on their resumes.
NCAA Tourney outlook for your conference's teams
- Thread starter GE Nole
- Start date
St. Mary's won at Gonzaga. That is absolutely a difference maker on their resumes.
The Big10 has to be the worst conference at scheduling now. The Big12 and SEC both have done a nice job manipulating RPI. The Big10 as a whole has done a good job sabotaging themselves. The conference in down this year, but not as bad RPI is showing. Great job by the SEC on hires lately too. Pearl, Barnes, Howland, Martin, Johnson, and Drew have been a large step up. Cal doesn't have it as easy as he used to in the SEC (which in the long run is good for UK IMO). Kennedy has been very good at A&M as well, and White is a solid hire at UF. SEC used to be a bit of a joke, but there is a lot of basketball talent down south to work with.
Big10 team tourney teams:
MSU
Purdue
OSU
Michigan
Probably
Nebraska
Long Shot
Maryland
Penn St.
Win out and get to the Big10 final game for a snowball's chance in hell:
Northwestern
Indiana
Big10 team tourney teams:
MSU
Purdue
OSU
Michigan
Probably
Nebraska
Long Shot
Maryland
Penn St.
Win out and get to the Big10 final game for a snowball's chance in hell:
Northwestern
Indiana
Can I get a hypothetical scenario of a conference or even a team manipulating RPI? I know it happens and gotta think it's pretty smart but I really don't know what they would be doing unless they're targeting certain weaker non conference matchups with potential to have inflated RPI?
You basically schedule a bunch of teams in the 150-200 range, instead of absolute bottom feeder 300+ RPI teams. Mix in tough opponents with easy opponents at home (but not 300+ type teams)
https://squared2020.com/2017/03/10/how-to-game-the-rating-percentage-index-rpi-in-basketball/
It's a pretty simple system to manipulate.
1. Schedule lots of neutral site and road games because they count as more wins than home games.
2. Schedule a lot of teams that are average to below average on a national scale, but really good in their crappy conference.
For example, Buffalo is the 84th best team on KenPom, meaning any top 50 team should beat them most games. In fact, Buffalo has played 5 top 100 teams on KenPom and they are 0-5 against those teams.
But, they are 11-2 in their conference and 19-7 overall. And the RPI doesn't care about who those wins are against, all it cares is that Buffalo won the games and played most of their games away from home. So, Buffalo is 34th in the RPI, ahead of teams like Gonzaga, Louisville, Butler, Michigan, FSU, UF, Texas, etc.
Meantime, Oklahoma State is 64th on KenPom and has wins over Kansas, West Virginia, FSU, and Oklahoma. But they also have a lot of losses in the Big 12, and scheduled a lot of home games against awful teams in the OOC, so their RPI is 91.
Beating Buffalo at a neutral site is solidly a Quadrant 1 win. Beating Oklahoma State at a neutral site is barely hanging onto Quadrant 2 status. And this is why the RPI is dumb, and the committee's insistence on basing decisions off it is asinine.
Thanks guys, crazy stuff. Wonder if the committee would hold that against them if it seemed blatant enough but how seems doubtful. I think the quadrant wins/losses set up is interesting but really hate that it relies in RPI
They never have before. The MVC was brilliant at it 10-15 years ago, when the RPI first changed its formula to make road wins count as 1.4 wins and home wins only .6 wins. That's how they ended up with 4 or 5 teams in the Dance one year.
The whole thing is circular and double counting. Road wins boost your RPI. And then you get more credit for road wins in the quadrants.
Meanwhile, good teams with questionable RPIs often have questionable RPIs because of bad SOS. And then they get dinged on top of that for actually having a bad SOS. And then they get dinged because they have few Q1 wins, because their schedule was poor and didn't include many road games.
The double counting part is so frustrating. What would you propose instead? I love kenpom and sagarin but I'm not sure they want something like that giving too much weight just because of the emphasis on margin of victory. And there should also be an emphasis on actually winning games.... I've never paid much attention to rpi just because it's so dumb. I also have an issue with the grouping of games, ex. Beating a team ranked 1 at home has the same value as beating 25 at home? And then team 26 wouldn't count at home? Is that how it goes for Q1?
Similar threads
