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Post by lonewolf on Nov 1, 2011 9:06:45 GMT -5
I'm a West Coast guy, but speaking for the Pac 12, don't believe you could count on Oregon or Arizona to dominate any halfway decent team, which at the least Florida State and Northern Illinois are, and perhaps better. Win? Yes, but only a perhaps. The other 5? We'll see. Honestly, all of the schools I grew up watching, and for the most part, those I like to still follow and catch on TV/webstream are in both those conferences. I think many of the teams are very good, and am not arguing against or for any teams, just the logic of the matter.
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Post by karplets on Nov 1, 2011 9:49:56 GMT -5
...its a rating system that is purely objective. the problem though is a reliance on it as a means of listing the "best" teams, which is wholly flawed. Other sports such as football and basketball get to incorporate human, subjective rankings into their seeding process, which balances out a SOS and depth of teams played rating system.. Perhaps more importantly, they use other computer ranking systems besides the RPI: Sagarin, Massey and others. I don't know the exact nature of those systems, whether they are more Pablo-like or more Elo-like (i.e. more like chess ratings). Sagarin and Massey do both kinds of ratings. In some sports in the past, the NCAA has used the more Elo-like ratings from Sagarin for reasons that Sagarin understands although his more "predictive" system is, he believes, more accurate.
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Post by The Bofa on the Sofa on Nov 1, 2011 10:08:12 GMT -5
[for us commonfolks talking plain words, are we really blockheads for thinking that #42 in RPI has something to do with being the 42nd strongest team or something like it? But what is the "something like that"? For example, let's ignore the regional bias problem specific to volleyball for now. When RPI ranks a team #42, what does that mean? You say "it has something to do with them being the 42nd strongest team" but that isn't necessarily true. For example, maybe it means they are most likely to be somewhere between the 32nd and 52nd strongest team? Moreover, it's not even true that 42nd must be the most likely ranking for them, because that assumes a mean with a reasonably normal distribution. If an RPI ranking of 42 actually means that "the team is between the 32nd and 52nd best teams" it would certainly fall under the category of "something like that" but does not have to mean it is the 42nd best team in the country. Now, as I have noted in a separate thread is that if that is the case, and it's actually a pretty fair assessment I think, then the failing is in using RPI as too fine of a razor in either picking the last couple of teams for the tournament or in setting seeds, and of course I would advocate against that. But that requires that people understand RPI enough to recognize the limitations of its use.
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Post by c4ndlelight on Nov 1, 2011 10:10:28 GMT -5
In addition to the regionalization, the 22 game conference schedule is also weighing down the Pac-12. We basically lost 48 OOC games vs. the old 18 games schedule. Considering we win OOC at about a 75% clip (it was last time I checked, not sure what the final number this year is), but lose in conference games at a 50% clip, we went from 36-12 to 24-24 in those games..... that's a huge hit to the RPI.
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Post by karplets on Nov 1, 2011 10:54:34 GMT -5
[for us commonfolks talking plain words, are we really blockheads for thinking that #42 in RPI has something to do with being the 42nd strongest team or something like it? But what is the "something like that"? For example, let's ignore the regional bias problem specific to volleyball for now. When RPI ranks a team #42, what does that mean? You say "it has something to do with them being the 42nd strongest team" but that isn't necessarily true. For example, maybe it means they are most likely to be somewhere between the 32nd and 52nd strongest team? Moreover, it's not even true that 42nd must be the most likely ranking for them, because that assumes a mean with a reasonably normal distribution. If an RPI ranking of 42 actually means that "the team is between the 32nd and 52nd best teams" it would certainly fall under the category of "something like that" but does not have to mean it is the 42nd best team in the country. Now, as I have noted in a separate thread is that if that is the case, and it's actually a pretty fair assessment I think, then the failing is in using RPI as too fine of a razor in either picking the last couple of teams for the tournament or in setting seeds, and of course I would advocate against that. But that requires that people understand RPI enough to recognize the limitations of its use. Yeah but isn't it a huge disparity (and a nonsensical one at that) between #42 (which could be 32 or 52) and... #104??? And that's what RPI does although, as you know better than anybody, the Committee (and their sacred Handbook) deliberately leave unsaid what the RPI is or what it is a measure of. (Leading us to the rather dismal conclusion that RPI simply "is" . Or is what it is.) (As an aside, I read somewhere that the NCAA actually refers to Elements 2 & 3 as a "strength-of-schedule" component but let's leave that aside for the moment) My example is from women's soccer (which as everyone here can easily guess, I'm a big fan of) but I'm sure, given how RPI works, there's going to be some pretty horrifying examples in VB too. I mean, we get trapped in the Alice-in-Wonderland world of the Committee's language (or the illusions of language): RPI is simply RPI, it isn't a "measure of strength" ("We didn't say that! Where does it say that, young man or young woman?!"). So it isn't a contradiction in the Committee Wonderland that a team's RPI may be nowhere near how it's ranked in terms of an opponent's strength-of-schedule. But us plain-talkin' folk know it doesn't make sense. By the way, you curious to see what the reaction would be to an "Approx Strength" list like the one at NC-Soccer? It arose out of a discussion over at BigSoccer. I was wondering if some of you here might think it worth suggesting to Rich Kern .
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Post by Mr. Wednesday on Nov 1, 2011 13:17:01 GMT -5
[quote author=karplets board=general thread=40940 You may then notice something else -- that where a team ranks in "Approx Strength" is sometimes nowhere near its own calculated RPI. For example in women's soccer recently Ohio State's ranked #42 in the RPI but its "Approx Strength" was ranked #104.
[...]
THIS IS SIMPLY ILLOGICAL ON THE PART OF THE RPI.[/quote]
It's an inevitable "feature" of a non-recursive system. The only way to eliminate such discrepancies is to incorporate recursion, so that the results of the rating feed back into the "schedule strength" parts of the rating, and the whole thing is run to self-consistency. As far as I know, all of the major non-RPI ratings in sports do this*, or suffer from the same issues as RPI.
* I'm oversimplifying a little bit here; the whole thing ends up being a massive linear algebra problem, so there are linear systems that admit a single-pass solution without iteration; it's the non-linear systems that require iteration to self-consistency.
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Post by redbeard2008 on Nov 1, 2011 14:03:03 GMT -5
In addition to the regionalization, the 22 game conference schedule is also weighing down the Pac-12. We basically lost 48 OOC games vs. the old 18 games schedule. Considering we win OOC at about a 75% clip (it was last time I checked, not sure what the final number this year is), but lose in conference games at a 50% clip, we went from 36-12 to 24-24 in those games..... that's a huge hit to the RPI. This is where skipping conference opponents can be a big RPI boost, with more higher-win teams to spread their juice around, even though it harms competition. A 12-team 3-pod system where each team skips half the teams from the other pods, while playing everyone in their own pod would end up with a 14-game season. As it is now, competitive conferences that play a round-robin schedule are being punished.
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