Aargh wrote:I think Valley fans pay too much attention to RPI. RPI is nothing more than an indicator and it can get way out of whack. I think the Selection Committee has recognized this problem many years ago and the Committee has probably been using RPI appropriately by mostly ignoring it.
Let's say that a team played half their season against end-of-the-season top-50 teams and went 8-8 in 16 games. That would establish them as probably the 20th-30th best team in the country. Their RPI would probably be below 10. There's the first problem.
Now, have that same team play another 16 games against bottom-50 teams and win all the games. The cupcakes kill the team's RPI. The team, that is now 24-8 in March, probably has an RPI around 70 or 80.
The team is established as a top-25 type team, yet they have an RPI that would lead to automatic elimination by the Committee if you just looked at RPI.
WSU's game against ChiSt demonstrates this. Compared to all other teams, WSU had been 28th based on their performance to this point. After playing ChiSt, WSU dropped to 50th because the SoS component was affected. WSU didn't actually get worse in comparison to other teams, but the RPI indicates they did.
This is probably what affected MSU a couple of times under Hinson. Other schools had played more games against higher-level competition (and won enough of those games), but also played more games against lower-level competition. MSU had a great W/L record and a solid SoS component, but beating RPI 100-150 teams bumped MSU's SoS higher than some other schools with a bunch of W's over RPI 250+ teams.
If Team A beats an RPI 100-150 opponent and Team B beats an RPI 250 opponent, that does nothing to indicate which team is better, but Team A will have a much higher RPI than Team B.
The RPI doesn't care about a team's rank; the NCAA committee does when looking at the overall resume, but the RPI itself doesn't give a whit whether a team's #1 or #300. The RPI is only concerned with records, as in your own, your opponents', and your opponents' opponents'. It's almost always better to play a 20-10 team ranked 100 in the RPI than it is a 16-14 team ranked 45th, for purely RPI purposes.
If you really want to game the RPI, you want to play teams that will finish with great records against weak-to-mediocre competition; think conference champions of the low majors and the like. Those are high probability wins that will look a helluva lot better than they should, because any damage to the opponents' opponents' record is more than offset by their sterling record counting towards your own SOS, which is the most heavily weighted portion (comprising 50% of the total RPI).
The other thing is that the RPI is a decent enough metric at the end of the season. People often complain that simply playing a strong/weak team can raise/lower your RPI significently regardless of outcome. Which is true, but since its purpose is simply to rank what has actually happened without any predictive value or assumptions about what could have happened, then that's not really a flaw so much as someone asking it to do something that it isn't meant to do.
I'm not saying the RPI is perfect or that there aren't better systems out there. But it is what it is.
My biggest issue with it is that the committee uses it in different ways for different teams. A good RPI will get a major conference team into the tourny, and a bad one will keep a mid-major out. But a good one won't get a mid-major in, and a bad one won't keep a major one out. But that has more to do with the biases of the humans, and less an issue with the RPI itself.
