Don't Whine, DO Something About It

If you know that the committee relies on RPI so much: teams should schedule so as to acquire the best RPI by seasons end.

We need a committee. I suggest we pick five members. Three from the east coast, one from the midwest and one from the west coast. No member from Hawaii should be allowed. To be fair we can use the RPI or Repetitive Posts Index. In this way sheer number of posts will be the determining factor. The quality of the posts is way too subjective to be used in determining committee membership. Secondary factors such as competency in name calling and righteous indignation might also be factored in.

I like it. I like that someone's talking about actually doing something about it. Don't be discouraged if it doesn't happen right away -- the important thing is you're getting people to start thinking of concrete steps to take instead of just endlessly talking about it.

I will say this, though. Don't be so halfway about the RPI. Get rid of it.

At most, allow its use only in extraordinary circumstances such as if there are reasons to believe the other ranking system's integrity has been compromised.

The RPI is fundamentally flawed. To keep it on as part of a hybrid-ranking system or to simply tweak it in some ways is to imply that it has a legitimacy that it simply does not deserve.

Get rid of it. Choose between Pablo or a chess-rating (Elo) type of system.

Or propose Pablo and offer an Elo system as a 2nd choice -- because the NCAA may well reject Pablo as an official ranking system on grounds that the NCAA may well be adamant in insisting are legitimate ones.

Makes no sense. After the preliminary games, everyone plays in their conferences. Teams in weak conferences will earn higher RPI's than those in the PAC-10, Big-12, and Big-10.

I know a lot of the discussion focuses on the models used to predict ranking. While that discussion is worthy, I think a lot of missing the substance of what is deficient in the tournament. In general, if the VB tournament could remove inequities and become more like the men's BB tournament, then I believe it would help to generate interest and fairness. I think the biggest problem right now is the use of 'host' sites for the tournament that for the most part go hand in hand with the seeding. The key is not to do what you don't need to do.


#1) Seeding and hosting. Get the host sites set before the season starts. VB is biggest in the heartland (hard for me to state as a west coaster), so divide it into West, Mid-West, Mid-East & South-East. Hawaii, Northwest, Bay Area, SoCal, Utah/Colo., Ariz are natural sites to have 4 each year in the west as an example. There's a lot of worry about sub-regionals not attracting crowds, but basically you can't go wrong with a LA and SF sub-regional every year and then rotating the other 2. Or have 2 sub-regionals at one site like basketball. Yes, there will be a year where if a regional is in Salt Lake, and Utah/BYU don't make it, you worry about low attendance, but hey, USU made it this year!! You have the same problem with regionals anyway. Furthermore, there should be rule that a sub-regional and regional cannot be at the same site.

#2) Don't seed 1-16 for the nation. Seed at least 1-8 for each regional. Instead the commitee should create trial seeds nationally & groups from 1-32. Not only does the RPI-centric seeding suck, it propagates criticism, it invites nudging the seeding to match hosting and hamstrings the committee. The committee can generate a rough seeding, but then they should have 4 #1s, 4#2s, 4 #3s,... etc. It doesn't really matter if Nebraska or Stanford is #2 or #3, nor do Stanford or Neb care about being #2 or #3. so just DON"T do it. And it really doesn't matter then if the #12 & 13 are backwards as a practical matter. By not having to force the system & seeds into host sites as well, it frees the committee to focus on spreading teams out. Duke is a prime example. Even if they still ended up a #12 and hosted, at least they should have had a #20ish team on their court. Imagine the benefit to the tournament if Duke & San Diego (or Duke & Cincinnatti) had played 2nd round - it would be better for Duke and the ACC, WCC/Big East and better for volleyball, and it would negate and self-correct any criticism of seeding.

#3) Separate the top teams from multiple bid conferences. If a conference has 4 teams, they should all be in different regionals as a guideline. By doing #1 & #2, the committee can more easily do #3. And if 2 teams from a conference are top 4 seeds, then it forces the two teams to different regionals. What this does is that even there is some dispute over teams getting a wrong 'seed', it allows the competition between conferences to 'sort' it out on the court.

#4) Use the travel & regionalization to benefit the tournament, not to discredit it. Look a the tournament this year. USC & Stanford are in Dayton. Mississippi and North Carolina in Berkeley - the NCAA has these travel goals, yet ends up with a tournament with teams traveling anyway that don't make sense. So let the traveling make sense to more equitably create brackets.

#5) RPI and other models. I really don't care which model is used, but don't have the model run the tournament which is what happened this year. I don't care whether it's Pablo or RPI. The committee should clearly know that the computer model is to be used as a GUIDELINE (i.e., sanity check and to create seeds with results 1-100, etc.) but not to be used as excuse, answer to a FAQ, or rule-book.

lastly, I don't want to hear about how 'time-limited' etc. problems for the committee. This is 2010, we have web-conference, telephone conferences, all sorts of methods, so that if the committee starts their seeding/grouping work even remotely a week before the tournament, they can get it done.

As I understand it, this suggestion is based on a fundemental misunderstanding of how RPI is calculated. It's based on W/L records, not the relative rankings of your opponents.

It vote OverandUnder.