2017 RPI: Week 1 update...

[DeviousDawg]

I know it's way too early right now, but I am going to update the RPI of all of our non conference and conference opponents on a weekly basis. It will be fun to keep up with a running total of the record and RPI changes of our opponents. I will also post notables for our opponents along with the RPI updates.

CONFERENCE OPPONENTS:

Week 1 notables:

-South Carolina went 2-1 this weekend, dropping one to national powerhouse University of North Carolina at Greensboro
-Ole Miss swept a top 10 team in East Carolina.
-Alabama went 2-1, dropping one game to Presbyterian College.
-Kentucky was swept by North Carolina.
-Tennessee went 2-1 against Memphis.
-Georgia went 1-2, dropping two games to Charleston.

http://i67.tinypic.com/2l96pt0.png


NON-CONFERENCE OPPONENTS:

Week 1 notables:

-Morehead State went 2-2, splitting with Jacksonville and splitting with Jackson State.
-Indiana State lost 1 to Illinois State while beating Youngstown State and Austin Peay.
-Oregon went 1-2 against Fresno State, who went 20-31 last year. A game 4 will be played tomorrow.
-La Tech swept UAPB 3-0 with a combined score of 40-4
-South Alabama swept Eastern Illinois, winning game two 32-0.
-Florida International went 1-2 vs Jacksonville State.
-Troy went 2-2 vs Xavier.

http://i65.tinypic.com/r8ynp5.png

[Todd4State]

RPI is without question unstable at this point in the season as always- however losing to Western Illinois would have been a blow early on. I'm anticipating that Morehead State's RPI could potentially drop quite a bit and Marist this weekend are going to just like the Western Illinois games- we need to win to avoid a big RPI hit.

I see Oregon doing about what they did last year- probably the bottom half of the top 100 RPI and possibly even top 150. Their coach is on the hot seat right now and he needs to get them at least into a regional. That could be one of the better jobs available in the offseason.

[DeviousDawg]

RPI is without question unstable at this point in the season as always- however losing to Western Illinois would have been a blow early on. I'm anticipating that Morehead State's RPI could potentially drop quite a bit and Marist this weekend are going to just like the Western Illinois games- we need to win to avoid a big RPI hit.

I see Oregon doing about what they did last year- probably the bottom half of the top 100 RPI and possibly even top 150. Their coach is on the hot seat right now and he needs to get them at least into a regional. That could be one of the better jobs available in the offseason.

Yeah, the RPI is definitely clueless at this point. It doesn't see a team's ranking or what they did last year. It will take 3-4 weeks for enough teams to play each other and a pecking order to begin to emerge before the RPI can start making sense of itself. For instance, the RPI had no clue how good of a team ECU was, because they haven't played anyone else, so Ole Miss sweeps them and their RPI is 83.

Basically, the RPI works off of 3 percentages, a teams winning percentage(counts for 25%), a team's opponents' average winning percentage(counts for 50%) and a teams opponents' opponents' winning percentage(counts for 25%). In baseball, an away win counts for 1.3 wins and a home win counts for 0.7 wins.

So the equation for the rpi is: RPI = (WP * 0.25) + (OWP * 0.50) + (OOWP * 0.25)

So let's create a hypotetical situation where State, Arkansas, LSU and Auburn all play each other twice, with each team having 1 home game and one away game.

MSU @ LSU: MSU wins
MSU vs Arkasas: MSU wins
LSU @ Auburn: LSU wins
Arkansas vs Auburn: Arkansas Wins

Winning Percentage:

State- (1.3+0.7)/(1.3+0.7) = 1.00
LSU- (1.3+0.0)/(1.3+0.7) = 0.65
Arkansas- (0+0.7)/(1.3+0.7) = 0.35
Auburn- (0+0)/(1.3+0.7) = 0.00

Average Oponents Winning Percentage: **does not include opponents games against yourself**

State- (LSU(1.0)+Auburn(0.0)+Arkansas(1.0))/3 games = 0.66
LSU- (MSU(1.0)+Auburn(0.0)+Arkansas(0.5))/3 games = 0.50
Arkansas- (MSU(1.0)+LSU(1.0)+Auburn(0.0))/3 games = 0.66
Auburn- (MSU(1.0)+LSU(0.0)+Arkansas(0.0))/3 games = 0.33

Average Opponents' Opponents Winning Percentage:

State- (LSU(0.50)+Arkansas(0.66)+Auburn(0.33))/3 games = 0.50
LSU- (MSU(0.66)+Arkansas(0.66)+Auburn(0.33))/3 games = 0.55
Arkansas- (MSU(0.66)+LSU(0.50)+Auburn(0.33))/3 games = 0.50
Auburn- (MSU(0.66)+LSU(0.50)+Arkansas(0.66))/3 games = 0.61

RPI:

State- (1.00*0.25)+(0.66*0.50)+(0.50*0.25) = 0.708
LSU- (0.65*0.25)+(0.50*0.50)+(0.55*0.25) = 0.551
Arkansas- (0.35*0.25)+(0.66*0.50)+(0.50*0.25) = 0.546
Auburn- (0.00*0.25)+(0.33*0.50)+(0.61*0.25) = 0.319

So essentially, don't lose at home to teams you shouldn't, and win some away games that you shouldn't, and you will be set up for a good RPI. Obviously, that's in a nut shell, and scheduling is the biggest component. Not losing that second game to Western Illinois was huge for our future RPI, it would've really hurt us down the road.

[MetEdDawg]

Well the good thing about our expectations for this year is that I feel like they were pretty reasonable at the outset. Except for a small portion, most of us didn't lose our crap when we lost to a Top 15 team. This team is gonna take some lumps. May lose a few we definitely shouldn't. But we need to hold serve on these weekends and that's what we did.

We need to get to a two seed because if we get paired up with a region where a 2 seed comes out, we are about as close to a shoe in to host as any other team in the country. Weekends like this one get us there. Good job by the team on two comeback wins and an early season Top 20 RPI win.

[CadaverDawg]

I like playing tough games early, for a couple reasons....1) it prepares you for SEC play. 2) You can catch a good team before they've put it all together and grab a good rpi win. Ole Miss usually plays a top 10-15 team OOC early, and it usually does enough to float their rpi through the crappy teams of OOC, and once you get to SEC play your rpi will only go up if you're decent.

[DeviousDawg]

I like playing tough games early, for a couple reasons....1) it prepares you for SEC play. 2) You can catch a good team before they've put it all together and grab a good rpi win. Ole Miss usually plays a top 10-15 team OOC early, and it usually does enough to float their rpi through the crappy teams of OOC, and once you get to SEC play your rpi will only go up if you're decent.

Defintely agree. Ole Miss does a great job of scheduling for RPI in both Baseball and Basketball, we could learn something from them.

Our OOC has the potential to be pretty decent RPI wise, depending on how a few teams do.

We play 8 OOC games against teams that were top 50 RPI in 2016.
La Tech (31)
South Alabama (39)
South Alabama (39)
@ South Alabama (39)
USM (21)
Ole Miss (10)
Texas Tech (14)
Texas Tech (14)

Then, we have 8 more games against teams that were in the top 51-100 RPI

Indiana St. (71)
Indiana St. (71)
@ Oregon (82)
@ Oregon (82)
@ Oregon (82)
FIU (99)
FIU (99)
Troy (93)

Comparatively, in 2016, we played 5 top 50 RPI teams, and 8 top 51-100 RPI teams.

It's nice that we will get to play Oregon at their place. They should be top 100 RPI team, and if we could take two, or even sweep, it would really boost our Non-conference RPI. Taking two would count for 2.6 wins, while sweeping at home would only count for 2.1. I don't know why we don't schedule more out of conference away games, that in itself kills our RPI.

The biggest thing with the non conference schedule is not losing to bad teams. We have 7 games that we CANNOT lost on our schedule, we have already won 2 of them.

Western Illinois
Western Illinois
Marist
Marist
Arkansas Pine Bluff
Columbia
Columbia
MVSU

They will all be 200+ RPI teams and we have to win all of those. Other than that, we have a game @ Memphis, who was a 200+ RPI team last year. However, they beat Tennessee once this weekend, and we are playing at their place. So if we lost that game it wouldn't be the end of the world.