Posted by ScooterDevil on January 31, 10 at 22:15:48:
In Reply to: Re: I agree Scooter ! ! ! WON'T MATTER IN TIME THOUGH. posted by dstyle on January 31, 10 at 18:12:30:
The problem is not necessarily with the schedule. A few years back we played Princeton who was coming off a string of Ivy League titles, and LSU. Both looked like decent OOC games. Both teams had horrible seasons and it killed our RPI. ASU schedules just like everyone else. No one knows that Western Illinois is going to be 200 RPI points worse than NAU. You can't account for that crap when scheduling. The one thing they can do is too get rid of a few of the for sure 1 bid league matchups (i.e. ATL-Sun, MEAC, Summit, SWAC), and replace them with a few mid-major conference games (i.e. Missouri Valley, Colonial, Horizon). That would probably boost our RPI quite a bit.
: : : I have to question how they come up with this RPI rating system. Let's look at 2 schools in particular. ASU and San Diego State:
: : : ASU: 15-7 overall, 5-4 in the PAC10. Of ASU's 15 wins, 3 came against teams in the top 100 in RPI (San Diego St 36, Washington 64, Washington State 99). Of their 7 losses only 1 came against a team outside the top 100 (UCLA 129). Four of them came against teams in the top 40 (Duke 5, BYU 20, Cal 21, Baylor 26). The average RPI of the 7 teams ASU lost to was 50.
: : : San Diego State: 15-6 overall, 4-3 in the Mountain West. Of San Diego States 15 wins 2 came against teams in the top 100 of RPI (New Mexico 12, Arizona 60). Of their 6 losses one came against a team outside the top 100 (Wyoming 199). Three of them came against teams in the top 30 (BYU 20, St. Marys 35, UNLV 37). The average RPI of their losses was 79.
: : : So if you look at those profiles one would expect that ASU would have a slightly higher RPI, or it would be pretty close. The reality is that San Diego State has an RPI of 36, and ASU's is 85. A difference of almost 50. How can that be?
: : : Well this is the problem with RPI. San Diego State played 2 non division 1 teams in it's schedule (UC San Diego and Pomona Pitzer). These two games don't figure into San Diego States RPI calculations at all. So whereas ASU plays Division 1 Wester Illinois (RPI 319) and USC-Upstate (RPI 320), San Diego actually benefits by scheduling non D1 schools. The second problem is that too much weight is put into how bad your bad opponents are. Should it really matter that we beat Western Illinois by 52, while they beat NAU by 41? The problem is that NAU has an RPI of 187, while Western Illinois is 319. So that kills our strength of schedule. That should not matter as much as it seems to.
: : : Hopefully the committee looks at this logically and not numerically.
: : In time, it won't matter because we'll be playing better schedules and be a better team year in and year out. Don't count us out of the tourney yet. Winning the regular season title or the conf. championship is going to be tough but it's not over yet. GO DEVILS ! ! !
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: What makes you think Herb is going to play a better schedule? I doubt it happens.