You gotta love RPI.
- Thread starter mcdawg22
- Start date
Don't care 'bout RPI ...
but think you may see a couple of these teams in the CWS ...
Rating Percentage Index (RPI)
Records include games against Division I opponents only.
but think you may see a couple of these teams in the CWS ...
Rating Percentage Index (RPI)
Records include games against Division I opponents only.
The team that really jumps out to me in the RPI T25 is UAB. After looking at that schedule that's really bizarre. No Offense to UAB of course
It's really not ever relevant, other than it's the formula the NCAA officially uses to rank teams. UConn is by far the best women's basketball team in the country. They've blown out Notre Dame (76-58) and South Carolina (87-62). Notre Dame is ranked #1, South Carolina #4 and UConn #5. The formula is seriously flawed.
The RPI is more about your schedule than wins and losses. If your schedule is tough, you automatically boost your RPI whether you win those games or not. The UConn women's RPI is 5 because they play in the crappy American Conference, which pulls their strength of schedule down. Therefore they are behind two teams they blew out.
We're more into banners. Billboards are more your thing.
And pat is right. RPI is 75% SOS and 25% your actual record. That's why it pays to be smart with scheduling, something the SEC didn't figure out for basketball until just a couple years ago, which has been a big reason why the league has has such bad luck with getting more teams to the dance.
Also, wins at home only count as 0.6 wins, while road wins count as 1.4 wins. In other words, a road win is more than twice a home win. Losses are the same but reverse, with home losses counting as 1.4, and road losses counting as 0.6. Neutral site wins and losses are 1.0 a piece. You've got around 20 home games in a row to start the season. If you were to be 14-6 after that stretch, your RPI winning percentage would actually be .500. Obviously, that won't be your record, but even if you were 17-3, you'd only get credit for having a .708 winning percentage, not 0.850. Likewise, if you go on the road and lose 2 of 3, your RPI record for the weekend is actually 1.4-1.2 (0.538). On the flip side, if you go 2-1 at home in a series, your RPI record for that series is 1.2-1.4 (0.462).
That's why I don't understand your non-conference baseball schedule this year. It's an RPI nightmare. You only have 2 non-conference road games all year, Memphis and South Alabama, and you have two neutral site games (USM and Ole Miss). That puts a lot of pressure on the team to stack wins to make up for the lack of road opportunities.
Cohen did that a couple times at UK. Twice they started out like 20-0 before SEC play. In 2006, they went 20-10 in SEC play, but they couldn't get a national seed despite sharing the SEC title and basically running the table in non-conference play, because their schedule was filled with home games against weak competition. The next year, they did the same thing, and they went 13-16 in SEC play, but even with a plus record, and not awful SEC finish, they didn't get an invite to regionals, because their schedule was so home game heavy against weak competition, which dragged their RPI down.
I would've thought Cohen would be pushing for more road games after that experience at UK. For comparison, we have 8 road games and 2 neutrals in non-conference play, so only 16 true home non-conference games, compared to 22 for your schedule. That means we'll be able to take a weaker record to a similar RPI even as the schedule fills out and the RPI gets some strength as a metric.
Your post would have been somewhat funny if you had stopped after what I quoted here.
I do not think John Cohen needs to take advice from anyone on how to run MSU's baseball program. You can drop the concern trolling now.
That will never happen.
Harvard being #2 and having only played Woffard counts this entire poll out for me. Wait until conference play starts and it might be relevant.
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It also means you're more likely to have a weaker record in the first place. 6-4 through these first 10 won't be helping you when it's all said and done. Being #1 is an anomaly based on a few of your opponents being undefeated against other competition. With that said... we could definitely schedule better.
And that was my point. You see it in SEC basketball now that the league has wised up to the RPI. Teams are playing road games against weak competition, because it helps. They're playing tougher competition in general, because it helps.
Yes, it means more losses, but you can pretty much put a ceiling on your team's RPI by scheduling too many home games or too many weak opponents. You see it every year, and that RPI ceiling leads to a ceiling for whether you'll be able to host, whether you have a shot at a national seed, or if you end up on the bubble, whether you even get to a regional.
I certainly don't know more about baseball than him, but if he thinks scheduling 22 of 26 non-conference games at home is a wise idea, then I do know more about RPI than he does.
That wouldn't be shocking either. A lot of fans understand that type of stuff better than the coaches, because coaches don't concern themselves with it. Typically they hire somebody to think about those things for them, if they're smart about it.
This was a post from last year that talks about RPI assuming nothing has changed. I'm with you Bruiser - our scheduling could take some strategery.
I guess I need to remind everyone that MSU was 40-16 (16-14) in 2013 and was in the Top 16 RPI. Our out-of-conference schedule consisted of Portland, Purdue/Samford, St. Joseph's and Central Arkansas. Central Arkansas ended up OK but I am sure one of the teams we have played thus far (and including San Diego) will be just as good. All of those games in 2013 were at home too. We went 17-2 in those games and look to match that start again. So again, the SEC schedule will take care of any RPI concerns you may have. Was our SEC schedule harder in 2013? Perhaps, but our record was not great either at 16-14. Hopefully we will get to the 18 or 20 win mark this season.
Now, back to giving confirmation to Rebelbruiser for his successful concern trolling escapades.
Now, back to giving confirmation to Rebelbruiser for his successful concern trolling escapades.
Not that I disagree, but that is simply not the only path to get this done, and personally I think it might be the hardest. I think if we had won a few more SEC games, particularly Friday night vs. LSU or any game vs. Vanderbilt. And if we had scheduled harder, we might have lost. Bottom line is win the games.
Inevitably people will point to Arkansas in 2013 as evidence that you must schedule harder out-of-conference and that SEC play does not mean as much. People forget that Arkansas lost 8 out-of-conference games, and they did not play Vanderbilt (who sported a 26-3 SEC record).
Inevitably people will point to Arkansas in 2013 as evidence that you must schedule harder out-of-conference and that SEC play does not mean as much. People forget that Arkansas lost 8 out-of-conference games, and they did not play Vanderbilt (who sported a 26-3 SEC record).
I think it goes without saying that you try to win every game you can regardless of who you scheduled. So we've already done everything we could have to make our record better, 40-16 was the best we could do in the regular season. The one factor we could have controlled to give us a higher RPI was the OOC schedule.
Found this site just now: http://scoop.hoosiershq.com/2013/05/outlook-for-national-seeds-hosts-in-ncaa-basebal-tournament/#/2
Bottom line is, it is not as easy as saying "schedule harder".
Bottom line is, it is not as easy as saying "schedule harder".
It doesn't have to get a lot harder, but there is no reason we should play 5 SWAC games in a season. That is a joke.
I think scheduling smarter as opposed to scheduling harder would be better. If we are going to play 5 SWAC games - play 4 out of 5 on the road. Play Jackson State and Alcorn at Trustmark Park and make it a home game for them.
I don't recall the exact number, but the NCAA considers it a home game if a team plays X% of their games there. So scheduling JSU at Trustmark, while being obviously much closer to them than MSU, would only count as a home game for JSU if they met that benchmark.
There are a few possible exceptions, though. I think the one I have seen is a smaller school moving it to a larger ball park for attendance purposes, which they may be able to get done for an MSU game. However, JSU likely wouldn't want to go for that. They would go from getting a boost by playing MSU on the road to a big negative by losing a home game.
Rpi is not yet valid in baseball. It relies on team interconnectedness, so playing 3 game series makes it take a lot more games to become mathematically valid. As is, teams will jump/drop hugely based on what their past opponents do and viceversa.
When Bama rolls to Starkville, then we can talk about rpi. Until then, it's wasted typing.
Yes, we scheduled badly this year, but a lot of that was outside our control with the Louisiana tournament getting cancelled on us after we pulled out of the Minute Maid Classic. 3 months ago -- we were overscheduled. Had we gotten the one additional weekend against quality ooc opponents, it would have been about right imo. As is, we have to make it thru the noncon without slipping up...the margin for error is razor thin this year.
When Bama rolls to Starkville, then we can talk about rpi. Until then, it's wasted typing.
Yes, we scheduled badly this year, but a lot of that was outside our control with the Louisiana tournament getting cancelled on us after we pulled out of the Minute Maid Classic. 3 months ago -- we were overscheduled. Had we gotten the one additional weekend against quality ooc opponents, it would have been about right imo. As is, we have to make it thru the noncon without slipping up...the margin for error is razor thin this year.
Giving the gate to JSU in order to get an RPI bump seems idiotic to me.
That said, I am all for playing at Trustmark (and/or Biloxi or anywhere else with sizable amounts of Bulldog fans) in order to increase crowds. Too much emphasis being given to the RPI right now, and it does not even matter yet.
That said, I am all for playing at Trustmark (and/or Biloxi or anywhere else with sizable amounts of Bulldog fans) in order to increase crowds. Too much emphasis being given to the RPI right now, and it does not even matter yet.
Bingo, and this is what the SEC had screwed up so much in basketball.
It doesn't end up mattering as much in baseball for the SEC, because we play in the South and thus get exposed to better all around competition for non-conference play, but it helps to play on the road or in neutral site games.
It ticked me off so much watching the league fall behind with scheduling in basketball. This year though, just looking at our schedule, we played Dayton, Oregon, Coastal Carolina, and Troy on the road. With a football mentality, why would an SEC school ever play a road game with Coastal Carolina or Troy, or to a lesser extend Dayton (who I realize has a very good program going)? We also played SEMO in Southaven, so that it would count as a neutral site. You do those things because it boosts RPI, yet most of the SEC wasn't doing those things until recently, and we paid the price as a basketball conference in the reduced number of NCAA bids we would get every year.
Fortunately, the league finally wised up, only about a decade behind the rest of the country, and hired a scheduling guru to help all 14 league teams modify and plan future schedules to help strengthen RPIs league-wide. Now, this year, the SEC has 10 teams in the Top 100 of the RPI and 6 in the Top 50. Two years ago, the league only had 3 teams finish in the Top 50 of the RPI, and had 3 teams well into the 200+ range, largely because of poor scheduling.
It just strikes me to see your baseball team is virtually not leaving home for non-conference play, especially after it burned Cohen twice at UK doing the same thing.
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The thing State has going for it is they are a big boy when it comes to baseball. Cohen didn't have that luxury at Kentucky. We can make $$ for the NCAA come tourney time. I know publicly they are supposed to be unbiased but we know that isn't the truth.
Welcome to what Coach34 and I complained about for 10 years only to be told every time we brought it up that we should do a home and home with North Carolina and Kansas.
We were not even close to hosting last year. Our record was 35-21. Louisiana-Lafayette was the #1 overall seed.
What Hammer said. I think when it's close - our reputation and most SEC teams reputations help. Kentucky doesn't have that luxury.
Come on, bro. Our problems during those Stansbury years was not the out-of-conference schedule itself, it is that we lost games to teams like Rider, in addition to anyone with a pulse.
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