(For HOCKEY-L people, this comes out of a discussion on hockey3 dealing with Chris Lerch's DivII-III rating, which he is considering switching this season to match the RPICH rating done by Erik Biever for DivI teams (and which closely approximates the RPI used in selecting teams for the DivI tourney).) I'm curious about the fact that RPI seems to be preferred to SOS. I'm not saying that I disagree, but it is interesting that people are expressing this view at the same time that the use of RPI has been lambasted in DivI. What are the reasons for preferring RPI? Is it that some teams who were perceived to have been better were ranked higher in RPI than SOS? Then perhaps we have to ask what those perceptions are based on. What about cases in which RPI ranked teams lower? I have said this before, but my problem with the use of RPI in the selection process is that (in DivI), I think it is weighted too heavily. First, I'm not convinced that the weights given to the individual components are based on anything that makes sense. Should winning pct really be worth only 25%? And second, RPI should be used to generate an initial ranking of teams and then eliminated from the process if it is deemed that two or more teams have RPIs that are too close. Last year, if any two or more teams had RPIs that were within a certain threshold (again, a value that seemed arbitrary to me), the committee looked at "other factors". These factors included head to head, record against teams under consideration, record in last 20 games, record against common opponents...and RPI. In a head to head comparison between two teams, when looking at these factors, you received one "point" if you were better in a certain factor (i.e. common opp) than the other team. (You could receive > 1 point in head to head if, say, you had beaten a team 3x and lost to them once - difference is +2 points.) In some cases, RPI was a deciding factor - say if from those five factors, one team had +2, the other had +2, and one team had a slightly higher RPI. That team ended up with +3. But this was after the committee had already determined that the RPI difference was small enough that it effectively did not tell which team deserved to be ranked higher! That's why we went to these other factors in the first place. That, IMO, is one of the major problems with the process. RPI should NOT be one of the factors considered in head to head comparisons when two teams' RPIs are within the threshold. Just something to consider if the DivII-III people push to have RPI used in the selection process. BTW, in response to another question, the SUNYAC and MIAC winners have both received DivIII automatic bids. I believe that is related to the fact that all teams in those conferences are (or have been) DivIII, and so it is not possible for a non-DivIII team to win the conference tourney (say UConn in the ECAC East) and lay claim to the conference's automatic bid. --- --- Mike Machnik [log in to unmask] Cabletron Systems, Inc. *HMM* 11/13/93 <<<<< Color Voice of the Merrimack Warriors (station TBA for 94-95) >>>>>