--- "Colin R.Wrubleski" <loserbaby42@...> wrote:

> The strongest disagreement I have with "Evans, Jason" is, however,
> the first comment he makes. He says that the committee DOESN'T treat
> RPI as the be-all and end-all. I wish that were true--- WIN-LOSS
> record should be the most important factor--- but it isn't. Teams
> from the BCS with favourable RPI make the dance, even with an
> egregious number of losses. I still will NEVER comprehend the
> situation from a few years ago, where a 16-14 Georgia team not only
> made the dance (??) but was given a 9-seed. That's utterly absurd.
> The only thing that was used to justify that was a high (and
> obviously artificially inflated) RPI.

Every year someone interviews someone on the NCAA committee about the
[un]importance of the RPI and every year the committee mentions that
the RPI is but ONE of MANY factors, and suggests that the RPI is
overblown by fans and the media. Yet year in and year out there are
media members and by extension fans who are utterly convinced that the
RPI is the be-all and end-all when it comes to NCAA selections. (That
is until the eventually wake up.)

If you were to correlate the NCAA seeds (from the #1 seeds down to the
at-large bids) against the RPI, you will find that while there is a
general correlation, the accuracy is only so-so. You can do the same
analysis for polls (by including the 'also receiving votes') and other
mathematical models and will find varying correlations, some worse but
many better than the RPI.

But what is really interesting to me is that if you take an average of
these disparate ways of ranking teams and then correlate it against the
actual NCAA seeds, you will find a very good correlation. What that's
saying is that by taking MULTIPLE relevant factors into consideration
[such as strength of schedule (loosely the RPI), national prominence
(polls), power rating (Sagarin etc.)] you will arrive at a prediction
of seeding which is far SUPERIOR to any SINGLE measure.

I've done this type of analysis for quite a few years now and this
finding has come out EVERY SINGLE TIME. When you sit down to think
about it, it makes sense, as it would be expected that the committee
would sift through many different sources of information and ways to
dissecting the teams in order to reach their decisions.

The Georgia example is one which points to the power of the RPI, but
there are certainly other examples where a team made the at-large field
with a less than stellar RPI rating. As I said, on average, it's
obvious that there are quite a number of factors which go into the
NCAA's decision making, whether people want to recognize it or not.

Jon

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