The RPI provides pinpoint accuracy!          3/18/99
A week or so ago I asked here about where the RPI originated. Today, while nosing around the NCAA's website, I stumbled across at least a partial answer. What I found was an article in last month's NCAA News entitled "RPIs are excellent data source, but not panacea for championship selection." The entire article can be found at:
 
www.ncaa.org/news/19990215/active/3604n35.html   
In view of the generally low opinion expressed on this list about the credibility of the RPI, some of the statements in this article are nothing short of amazing. For example, the third paragraph of the article states...  
"Designed for pinpoint accuracy in rating teams according to various formulas, the RPIs offer sports committees the facts they need to make subjective decisions. In fact, because the RPIs are so accurate, the line between objectivity and subjectivity can sometimes blur."
 
I wonder what those guys were smoking when they wrote that.
 
As to its origin, it says...  
"Jim Wright, NCAA director of statistics, said talk of a rating-percentage index first emanated from the Men's Basketball Committee in the late 1970s and was kicked around by some mathematicians at Stanford University. [Stagat's note: Shoot! And I used to have some respect for Stanford.] NCAA staff, particularly the late Jim Van Valkenberg, then-director of statistics, also had a hand in various early permutations of the RPI."
 
"Those combined efforts led to the first RPI being used to help the Men's Basketball Committee select the Division I Men's Basketball Championship field in 1981."
 
It talks a lot about how selection committees use RPI as only one of several criteria in making their decisions. It carries on about how challenging it is to get accurate input data (i.e.: game results). Then there's a statement that I'm not sure that I understand. It says...
 
"The RPI is used not only to rate individual teams but conferences as well. In fact, in 1993, the NCAA Executive Committee stipulated that sports committees that award fewer automatic-qualification berths than there are eligible conferences for that sport must use the RPI as the sole determinant."
 
Does this mean that it is the RPI of the MACC (as a conference) vs. the rest of the world that *must* be used to justify not giving them an automatic berth? Does anyone here regularly compute inter-conference RPIs?
 
Bob Stagat
RPI (the school, not the rating) '64 '68
 
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