Dirtbags Baseball - Long Beach State 49ers

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Thursday, April 15, 2004

Hey NCAA - Fix the RPI

The Dirtbags are 4th in the nation in "Iterative Strength Ratings."

For those of you scratching your head and saying "huh?," let me explain. One of the factors used by the NCAA for determining which schools get into the post season tournament, and how they are seeded, is RPI. RPI stands for "Ratings Power Index." Basically, it's an attempt to weigh how good a team really is based upon the quality of their opponents, and their opponent's opponents.

According to Boyd Nation on his website boydsworld.com, here is what's wrong with the NCAA's RPI:

"Although things are improving, there's still a very limited amount of inter-regional play in college baseball. This means that in sections of the country with fewer Division I baseball schools, such as the West, the pool of available opponents tends to be smaller, which tends to pull winning percentages towards .500. As a result of the RPI only considering two levels of interconnectedness, teams from these regions tend to be underranked by the RPI's."

So Boyd, who is a lifelong college baseball fan who has a master's degree in computer science with a focus on algorithm development [a common combination, I am sure], came up with the ISR, or Iterative Strength Ratings. According to Boyd "the ISR's are the results of an algorithm designed to measure the quality of a team's season to date by combining their winning percentage with the difficulty of their schedule. The algorithm computes all teams simultaneously and attempts to take advantage of inter-regional games more accurately than other rating systems."

In other words, we in the West get treated more fairly. As I noted at the start of this post, Long Beach State is currently No. 4 in ISR. Boyd also computes psuedo-RPIs (as close as he can get since the NCAA keeps the RPI formula a secret). In psuedo-RPI, the Beach are currently No. 20. No one believes that the Dirtbags are the 20th best Division I baseball team in America. They are numbers 5, 5 and 8 in the three national polls. It is high time that the NCAA reformulates the RPI so that it fairly ranks teams, regardless of region. I think they ought to hire Boyd Nation to help them get it done.

posted on 4/15/2004 by Jeff Agnew

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