Dick Tuthill posted another rating method for college hockey teams yesterday. Using the RPICH numbers, Dick did some normalizing to come up with degrees of difficulty and corrected won-lost percentages. First comment: What Dick's method does is re-weight winning percentage, opponents winning percentage and opponents opponents winning percentage from .25, .50, .25 to 1/3, 1/3, 1/3. Second comment: I prefer 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 to .25, .50, .25. :-) If anyone is interested in number crunching and has plenty of time on their hands, I'd like to see .50, .25, .25 and .40, .30, .30 as well. Some of these linear combinations have been tinkered with before on Hockey-L. And, you can find RPICHs from 1993-94, 1992-93, and so on in the archives. [Actually...if you created a database from one of Erik's RPICH posts including school name and the three relevant percentages and accepted the fact that the input has been rounded to four decimal places, you can write a program -- using SAS or whatever you prefer -- that checks out any weighting scheme. I may do this when NCAA selection time comes around. Let me know if this is of interest.] Thank you to Dick for taking time to do the calculations and make the post. John Haeussler Univ of Michigan [log in to unmask]