Eric Burton (I think) says:
 
> >honest: Can QC run with the like of Maine. Is this a fair fight. Is this
> >going to hurt a team like Maine in the RPI?
 
Dick Tuthill answers:
 
> Next year Walsh knows that the MAAC teams will still have fairly insular
> schedules. He also knows that QC and UConn will still be at or near the top
> of the MAAC, and thus those teams will have very strong W/L records and
> SOS's due to their insularity if nothing else. So playing top MAAC teams
> will not hurt Maine's PWR at all,  and it may even help. If only Renssalaer
> had scheduled and beaten QC this year, for instance, they might well have
> gone to the dance instead of UNM. (Only John Whelan could tell us for
> sure.:-):-)
 
Actually, I've still got my
tinker-with-the-scores-and-recalculate-the-PWR script running at
http://www.slack.net/~whelan/cgi-bin/tbrw.cgi?hypo
(and the scores file does not include NCAA tournament games) so in
fact I'm anyone can answer questions like these themselves.
 
However, I happen to have done just the experiment Dick suggests,
adding a Rensselaer-Quinnipiac game (the ultimate College Hockey
spelling test).  While the Ratings Percentage Index makes it possible
for a team's rating to go down by playing and beating a team with a
sufficiently bad record, we learned this season that a weak team will
not neccessarily have a low RPI.  And it's even worse in this case,
since when you think about adding a single team to your schedule,
their winning percentage counts for 50/65=77% of the
strength-of-schedule determination and their opponents' winning
percentage only 15/65=23%.  So, in fact, if RPI had played and *tied*
Q, their RPI would have gone up.  And indeed, a win over Q (even if it
were not in the last 16 games) would have been enough to put them in
the tournament in place of Ohio State.
 
I think most people would consider the fact that tying Quinnipiac
would have raised RPI's RPI a weakness in the system, and one that
could not have been corrected by the current solution just
disregarding Q's RPI.  (In fact, Q is even more overvalued in their
contribution to strength of schedule than in their overall RPI.)  I
haven't run the actual numbers, but looking at the mathematics behind
KRACH shows that beating a team much weaker than you will raise your
rating a little, losing to them will lower it a lot, beating a team
much stronger than you will raise your rating a lot and losing to them
will lower it a little.  As Gary Hatfield puts it, there is always a
"non-positive response to losing" and a "non-negative response to
winning".  And "strong" and "weak" opponents are defined based on
something more robust than simple winning percentage.
 
                                          John Whelan, Cornell '91
                                                  [log in to unmask]
                                     http://www.amurgsval.org/joe/
 
Play along at home at http://www.slack.net/~whelan/cgi-bin/tbrw.cgi?hypo
 
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