Well, here goes nuthin'. We've all complained about the weighting factors in RPI or RPICH. Yesterday, I noted that the mathematical expression has the wrong form too. I think that Ken Butler, the KRACH author has said the same sort of thing about the form of the RPI model. (Of course Ken uses a much more sophisticated argument than I will here.) Basically the idea is that the won-loss percentage should be multiplied by a "degree of difficulty" to obtain a corrected won-loss percentage. How is the degree of difficulty to be calculated? Well, the most obvious way would be the opponents won-loss record. But of course not all opponents were created equal. So we need information about the opponents' opponents. This will of course involve the opponents won-loss multiplied by the opponents' degree of difficulty -- which of course will use the opp-opp won-loss percentage. But lets be REALLY scientific and renormalize the factors at each step so that we don't get any built in biases. Here's how it works. Find the maximum won-loss percentage of all the opp-opp's. From the latest RPICH table by Biever, that would be 0.5475 of Northeastern. Normalize all the opp-opp won-loss percentages to that value ==> for Northeastern the normalized value will be 1.0!!! For Maine it would be 0.9843. Now multiply the opponent won-loss percentages by the normalized opp-opp values to get the corrected opponent won-loss. For Maine, that would be 0.5396, which incidentally, will turn out to be the maximum corrected opponent won-loss percentage. Therfore, we use that value to normalize the corrected won-loss percentages and Maine gets a normalized 1.0 for degree of difficulty (or strength of schedule if you will). Finally, the normalized opponents' corrected won-loss percentage is multiplied by the teams' actual won-loss percentage to obtain the relative rankings. I've done this by hand for the top 21 RPICH teams, and the resulting table for the top 15 is given below: 1. Maine 0.8529 2. CC 0.7705 3. BU 0.6969 4. Denver 0.6697 5. Brown 0.6558 6. Minn. 0.6507 7. Mich. 0.6349 8. MSU 0.6287 9. NH 0.6218 10. NU 0.5452 11. Clarkson 0.5262 12. BGSU 0.5220 13. RPI 0.5060 14. Harvard 0.4947 15. Wisc. 0.4582 Disclaimer: I did this by hand and may have made a couple of minor mistakes. But I don't think that there is anything major wrong with the calculations. This method has produced some results which are kind of interesting. The top 4 are the same as RPICH, MN and Brown swap places, and Harvard drops from 10th to 14th. The latter effect is probably valid -- in KRACH Harvard was all the way down to 20th. I'd be interested in private comments. -- Dick Tuthill