Messed Up NCAA 2010 and 2011 RPI Ratings

I think I'm now safe in saying, with a great deal of confidence, that the NCAA messed up its RPI ratings and rankings for both the 2010 and 2011 seasons. For any RPI nuts out there who are interested in the details, see my full report in Post 1 on the BigSoccer thread here: http://www.bigsoccer.com/forum/showthread.php?p=24747400#post24747400

What a great piece of analysis! Thanks for sharing it. One can only hope that the NCAA will accept it in the spirit in which it was provided and make the necessary corrections.

A_Fan wrote:What a great piece of analysis! Thanks for sharing it. One can only hope that the NCAA will accept it in the spirit in which it was provided and make the necessary corrections.

Thanks for the compliment. We'll see what the NCAA does. They're clearly coming out of a culture of secrecy about the actual RPI ratings. So far though, they've still been very protective of the amounts of the good win/tie bonus and poor loss/tie penalty points that they apply in the transition from the normal (unadjusted) RPI to the Adjusted RPI. Still, I'm anticipating that pretty soon they'll start releasing those amounts too.

I think they're caught in a tough spot. They know that occasionally, they will have errors in their systems for the different sports -- either data errors or programming errors (since the different sports have sport-specific variants of the RPI formula). The errors can be embarrassing and, unlike what appears to have been the case for women's soccer in 2010 and 2011, can affect the NCAA tournament at large selection and seeding decisions. If they make significant errors, they'd probably prefer that everyone not know about it. And, if they make the detailed ratings and the bonus/penalty amounts public, then if they make a significant error there's a good chance everyone will know about it. On the other hand, the NCAA staff are hard-working people and I know they do not want to make errors. And, one of the best ways not to make an error is to make everything public so that some nut out there can identify the error for the staff and they can correct it during the course of the season. Hopefully, they'll value not making errors more than they value avoiding embarrassment.