College Baseball and RPI - 2021

[FredJacket]

Anybody up for some pre-season discussion over college baseball and RPI. Am I correct in this assumption.... RPI is still being used as a key measure to compare teams when the NCAA tournament committee parses teams for selection and seeding come May?

A few minutes googling around about RPI... there it not overwhelming 'support' for RPI as a great measure to compare teams. It seems to be the "best" alternative among no perfect ones; and still leaves some wondering if it is good enough. Here is a quick synopsis of what goes into the calculations:

It is based on a combination of a team's winning percentage, their opponents' winning percentage, and their opponents' opponents' winning percentage, with bonuses and penalties involved for road wins against top teams or home losses to lower-ranked teams.

The College Baseball Ratings Page -- Frequently Asked Questions

Starting in 2013, college baseball RPI formula values each road victory as 1.3 instead of 1.0. Each home win is valued at 0.7 instead of 1.0. Conversely, each home loss counts 1.3 against a team’s RPI and each road loss counts 0.7 against a team’s RPI. Neutral-site games have a value of 1.0, but the committee is studying how to determine if a game should be considered a neutral-site contest. The adjustment is based on data showing that home teams win about 62 percent of the time in Division I baseball."[5] The change was made because of the discrepancy in the number of home games teams play. Some schools are able to play 35–40 of their 56 allowable games at home, while other teams, due to factors such as weather, may play only 20 home games.

Rating percentage index - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

If there are more comprehensive or updated explanations of the calculations, I did not find them.

The RPI calculation gets more better as more games are played and the "opponents winning percentages" and "opponents' opponents' winning percentages" have an opportunity to "mature". One of the biggest criticisms of RPI for baseball is the fact that teams tend to have a schedule that keeps them playing teams 'regionally' and overlap across the full D1 geographic map is limited which may inflate some RPI's and depress others. The theory here is west coast teams suffer as a result.

The way 2021 is shaping up... these problems (if you buy them as problems) are going to be exacerbated.
1) Travel will be more confined/restricted to smaller radius from teams' home.
2) Fewer games will be played.
3) More conference games (by percentage) than out of conference.

My assumption is Ga Tech won't be negatively impacted by this because we play in a strong baseball conference AND 'may' be able to play some relatively strong out of conference competition. Is that reasonable? ...or am I missing something?

 

[eokerholm]

Found another site. Baseball Cube

College RPI​

Known in full as Ratings Percentage Index (RPI), it is an algorithm that attempts to accuately rank all Division I NCAA teams. It is easy enough to rank each team within their own division or conference since they play these teams often and can be compared directly by their Conference W-L record. However, not all conferences are of the same calibre despite the fact that they are in the same NCAA Division. The teams in the SEC are of a higher calibre than the teams in the America East Conference. Yet it is possible for a team in the America East to be 25-2 and a team in the SEC to be 9-17. This does not mean the team in the America East is a better baseball team since the SEC team plays tougher competition. The RPI algorithm takes into consideration a school's calibre of schedule and the schedule of those direct opponents before ranking each school. Therefore, it is very possible that a team in the SEC that is 9-17 finds itself higher in the rankings than the 25-2 team in the America East because the calibre of schedule between the 2 teams is far from equal.

I had found another when researching schools Boyd's World for RPI. (by Conference too).
We ended last year at 56.
GT was 11th in 2019 when we were researching.

If you're in the mood for polls, and other rankings, etc.
Here are a few that I found that we used when researching schools and programs

• NCBWA
• Baseball America Top 25
• Iterative Strength Rating (and Conference ISR)
• External Factor Index
• Coaches Poll

Along with the typical D1, NCAA, PG and others.
We slipped in the US News and World Report one for Best Colleges, which I find odd. #29 to #35.

Still going strong in the rankings by Class (which is what recruits look at) (this is old version).
But ranked by PG Class with Commit and Pitcher counts by school by class. Typically you look at 3 yr average (sorted here) as that is who used to be on campus when you got there...Covid messed all that up. I have not updated this since fall 2019 as you can tell by the commit counts, etc.