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 HOCKEY-L is for discussion of college ice hockey; send information to [log in to unmask], The College Hockey Information List.