Bob Stagat draws our attention to the following article
 
> www.ncaa.org/news/19990215/active/3604n35.html
 
This would be funny if the shortcomings of the RPI were not at the
center of a serious issue to be decided this weekend.  I hope it will
be funny on Monday.  I wouldn't read too much into its implications
for College Hockey, though, since ice hockey is not one of the eight
sports it lists as using the RPI (presumably this is because the
hockey committee gets its RPI from a slightly different source than
the other sports).
 
> "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?
 
I think this statement applies to situations where there, say, are 11
automatic bids to be given to 15 conferences and it's not known ahead
of time which conferences will get them.  Here it's a question about
whether to overrule the pairwise comparisons in handing out at-large
bids.  However, there is a reference to "overall conference RPI" in
the NCAA's statement of the MAAC escape clause.  To my knowledge, no
one from the NCAA has said exactly what the definition of that is.
 
I regularly calculate the average RPI of all the teams in each
conference, which contains the effects of out-of-conference play,
although heavily damped by the fact that conference games will cancel
out and drive each conference's average towards .500.  Here's the
latest, from <http://www.slack.net/~whelan/tbrw/details.dat>:
 
Average RPI by conference:
Hockey East 0.525
WCHA        0.504
CCHA        0.504
ECAC        0.496
MAAC        0.453
 
A more direct way of looking at this, however, is just to look at how
each of the D1 Independents did against each conference (because of
the lack of games between major conference and MAAC teams).  All this
information is in the conference strength table appearing in
<http://www.slack.net/~whelan/cgi-bin/tbrw.cgi?pairwise>.
 
                                          John Whelan, Cornell '91
                                                  [log in to unmask]
                                     http://www.amurgsval.org/joe/
 
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