Utah State, RPI #18 but how?

[xu05usmc]

Just looking through the rankings, and one team and their ranking makes absolutely no sense: Utah State. Currently #18 RPI, #23 in coaches, and 6 votes from being AP Top 25. Yet they have a SOS of 111, have no good wins (2 wins vs RPI top 100: #94 Long Beach State, and @ #56 St. Marys), and 1 bad loss (#138 Idaho). Yes, they are 24-3 (with the other two losses to BYU and Georgetown) but how can a team with a mediocre SOS and no quality wins be ranked so high? Anyone care to explain?

[GoMuskies]

25% of RPI is your winning percentage. Theirs is very, very high.

[waggy]

There is a reason that who you play is more an important than winning with the RPI: It benefits the big conferences that can afford home games. Because of this I don't trust the SOS numbers, and wish there was a compilation of people keeping track of SOS like there is for those keeping rankings. Utah State is a good team. Whether they are exactly #18, who knows, if there even is such a thing.

[xavierj]

Just looking through the rankings, and one team and their ranking makes absolutely no sense: Utah State. Currently #18 RPI, #23 in coaches, and 6 votes from being AP Top 25. Yet they have a SOS of 111, have no good wins (2 wins vs RPI top 100: #94 Long Beach State, and @ #56 St. Marys), and 1 bad loss (#138 Idaho). Yes, they are 24-3 (with the other two losses to BYU and Georgetown) but how can a team with a mediocre SOS and no quality wins be ranked so high? Anyone care to explain?

The Big East is like 11-17 on the road in non-conference games yet they are all high in the RPI. Most of the Big East teams having RPI's where they are shows how flawed the RPI really is. If you have a ton of teams and they play very few road games and then only schedule a couple of losses and win a most of their games they will carry a high RPI. The BIG East knows how to play the RPI game. No one can separate in the league, the league has about 2 NBA players out of 18 teams, they do not fare well on the road yet they are rated #1 in the RPI. I think they need a new computer ranking system. The ACC & SEC have about 4 times as many NBA players in much smaller leagues but the Big East gets all the press.

[WCWIII]

While Utah St. is 24-3, their losses have all come on the road. For RPI purposes, their WP is 21.6-1.8 or 0.9231. Compared with Xavier's RPI WP of 18.2-4.8 or 0.7913. Multiplying the difference by the 25% weighting, gives them an RPI advantage over Xavier of 0.0330.

The SOS advantage goes to Xavier. Xavier's Opponents have a WP of 0.5696 and Utah St 0.5343. The OOWP advantage also goes to Xavier 0.5334 to 0.5049. Putting it all together gives Xavier a 0.0330 SOS advantage that gets a 75% weighting for a Xavier advantage of 0.0248.

Overall, Utah St. has a higher RPI because of it's own Win-Loss record especially since losses on the road don't count that much. Xavier's SOS advantage isn't quite enough and Utah St. currently has a higher RPI.

People dis the RPI because of the emphasis on SOS. It's OK to dis the RPI, but people should realize that the OOWP includes yourself ... so your own W-L appears also in a small way in the SOS. But more importantly, because when you average over all your opponents, and especially over all your opponents' opponents, there isn't much difference in the 47th and 110th ranked SOS. There's some, but because everything is averaged as much as it is over large numbers of teams and games, the SOS, even with its high weighting, is not quite as important as many believe it to be.

[Muskied]

Utah State to me is just like a story I know called "The Puppy Who Lost His Way." The world was changing, and the puppy was getting... bigger. So, you see, the puppy was like Utah State. In that, they were both lost in the woods. And nobody, especially the little boy - "The Associated Press" - knew where to find 'em. Except that the puppy was a dog. But the Ratings Percentage Index, my friends, that was a revolution.

[SixFig]

Utah State to me is just like a story I know called "The Puppy Who Lost His Way." The world was changing, and the puppy was getting... bigger. So, you see, the puppy was like Utah State. In that, they were both lost in the woods. And nobody, especially the little boy - "The Associated Press" - knew where to find 'em. Except that the puppy was a dog. But the Ratings Percentage Index, my friends, that was a revolution.

I'll have whatever you're smokin. Trippy post.