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Post by slxpress on Nov 20, 2022 20:36:01 GMT -5
why limit the linear scale to an arbitrary limit at all? why not have a linear scale for the whole field? or just get rid of bonuses altogether. The bonuses are just a kludge to try to overcome the problem that RPI is bad at giving teams credit for beating high-level opponents. The whole RPI system is a stack of cards built on a shaky foundation, but the NCAA keeps using it. I think they like how it incentivizes teams to schedule a certain way in the OoC matches (that is, it incentivizes teams from top conferences to schedule against the better teams from lower-level conferences). But it's just a badly designed metric, and manipulating bad data by adjusting it with more bad data (trying to fix RPI by using RPI) is not really a good idea. Honestly the best idea I think I’ve ever heard in terms of fairness was your 64 team random draw tournament. That will never happen, because there are other priorities than fairness involved, but I love the idea.
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Post by jayj79 on Nov 20, 2022 20:51:20 GMT -5
Honestly the best idea I think I’ve ever heard in terms of fairness was your 64 team random draw tournament. That will never happen, because there are other priorities than fairness involved, but I love the idea. randomly drawing 64 balls from a bin containing all 345 teams in the division and just placing them into the bracket in the order in which they were drawn? thus rendering the regular season absolutely meaningless other than as a series of scrimmages?
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Post by mikegarrison on Nov 20, 2022 21:01:21 GMT -5
Honestly the best idea I think I’ve ever heard in terms of fairness was your 64 team random draw tournament. That will never happen, because there are other priorities than fairness involved, but I love the idea. randomly drawing 64 balls from a bin containing all 345 teams in the division and just placing them into the bracket in the order in which they were drawn? thus rendering the regular season absolutely meaningless other than as a series of scrimmages? No, that wasn't my suggestion. First of all, all AQs are in. This makes perfect sense if you are considering that this is not really a tournament to discover the best college volleyball team, it is a tournament to name one team as national champion. There should always be a path to just straight-up winning your way to the title, and the AQs are that path for every member of every conference in D1. Next, the current system for picking the at-larges is not great, but I think there is little dispute that it works well enough to select at least the top 20 at-larges with certainty. It's the selection of the "bubble" teams that are much more iffy, but not so iffy that I think it really requires wholesale changes. The problem is the seeding. Especially with home court advantage, the seeding is pretty much a self-fulfilling prophecy. Most other sporting leagues in the world either do seeding by random drawing or by actual results on the field/court/pitch/whatever. This business of a committee pre-selecting certain teams to have a special advantage in the tournament is problematical to me.
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Post by jayj79 on Nov 20, 2022 21:05:39 GMT -5
The problem is the seeding. Especially with home court advantage, the seeding is pretty much a self-fulfilling prophecy. Most other sporting leagues in the world either do seeding by random drawing or by actual results on the field/court/pitch/whatever. This business of a committee pre-selecting certain teams to have a special advantage in the tournament is problematical to me. If they seeded strictly by unmodified RPI (no arbitrary bonuses), then it would be determined by actual results on the court.
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Post by slxpress on Nov 20, 2022 21:06:24 GMT -5
randomly drawing 64 balls from a bin containing all 345 teams in the division and just placing them into the bracket in the order in which they were drawn? thus rendering the regular season absolutely meaningless other than as a series of scrimmages? No, that wasn't my suggestion. First of all, all AQs are in. This makes perfect sense if you are considering that this is not really a tournament to discover the best college volleyball team, it is a tournament to name one team as national champion. There should always be a path to just straight-up winning your way to the title, and the AQs are that path for every member of every conference in D1. Next, the current system for picking the at-larges is not great, but I think there is little dispute that it works well enough to select at least the top 20 at-larges with certainty. It's the selection of the "bubble" teams that are much more iffy, but not so iffy that I think it really requires wholesale changes. The problem is the seeding. Especially with home court advantage, the seeding is pretty much a self-fulfilling prophecy. Most other sporting leagues in the world either do seeding by random drawing or by actual results on the field/court/pitch/whatever. This business of a committee pre-selecting certain teams to have a special advantage in the tournament is problematical to me. Yeah, your comparison was to the World Cup.
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Post by mikegarrison on Nov 20, 2022 21:14:19 GMT -5
The problem is the seeding. Especially with home court advantage, the seeding is pretty much a self-fulfilling prophecy. Most other sporting leagues in the world either do seeding by random drawing or by actual results on the field/court/pitch/whatever. This business of a committee pre-selecting certain teams to have a special advantage in the tournament is problematical to me. If they seeded strictly by unmodified RPI (no arbitrary bonuses), then it would be determined by actual results on the court. But not in a good way. I mean, they could seed based on number of ball handling errors for the season, and that would be "based on results on the court", but it would be a lousy way to seed. In leagues where seeding is done based on results, it is usually done by just straight up season wins and losses. That's a problem in the NCAA because teams don't play balanced schedules. The other way it is often done is by randomly drawing teams into round-robin pools and then seeding based on the results of pool play.
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Post by jayj79 on Nov 20, 2022 21:57:16 GMT -5
In leagues where seeding is done based on results, it is usually done by just straight up season wins and losses. That's a problem in the NCAA because teams don't play balanced schedules. The other way it is often done is by randomly drawing teams into round-robin pools and then seeding based on the results of pool play. They don't have balanced schedules in the NFL or MLB either.
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bluepenquin
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Post by bluepenquin on Nov 21, 2022 9:49:13 GMT -5
Stanford loses two RPI Top 25 wins with USC falling to #26. There's been a lot of movement for so many teams in that #20-30 range; more to come, I'm sure. I'll just say again that it must have been a complete idiot who came up with the idea of a bonus for 1-25 and a smaller bonus for 26-50 but seemingly didn't realize that this means arbitrary discontinuities at 25-26 and 50-51. There is no reason these bonuses could not have been done as a simple linear scale between 1 and 50. Or even, let's say, a flat bonus from 1-20, a linear decrease from 21-30, a flat bonus from 31-45, and a linear decrease from 46-55. There are many, many ways they could have avoided this problem, and they chose to do none of them. From a practical standpoint - the RPI bonus point difference between beating the #25 RPI team and the #26 RPI team is very small and in most circumstances isn't going to make any difference in the team's RPI rank or their bracket placement. The impact gets way overblown here on VT. The much bigger impact on the selection process is the wins against the T25 and T50 - where the difference between 25 and 26 and 50 and 51 can impact the bracket. It is here where the committee needs to property differentiate the quality of wins and not just look at just treat all T25 wins the same and proportionally superior to all T50 wins.
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