Everyone who was concerned about our schedule has been proven correct

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Originally Posted by Bdawg

With our non-con schedule, I think we knew from the beginning it was weak and didn’t need to lose many or there would be some kind detriment to our seasons results.

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Sure, or we could have not scheduled games against teams we knew would hurt our RPI and replaced them with teams that project into the 175-200 range, had the same 19-6 non-conference record, and we would be hosting right now.

I think we're probably around the 20th best team in America. We could have scheduled smart and gotten ourselves and RPI around #15, but instead we scheduled dumb and got ourselves and RPI of #23. "How can we maximize our RPI?" should be the top concern when making our schedule, and it's just crazy to me that that's apparently not a factor at all.

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Originally Posted by Cooterpoot

Our OOC schedule was one of the worst in the country.

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It was by no means good but there are 4 conference teams with worse and a fifth, LSU, was only two spots better than ours.

Imagine sweeping a conference opponent and your RPI falls. Teams have no control over that.
We can only schedule our OOC games and we really hurt ourselves with both scheduling and performance in those games. Even if we schedule great, if teams end up not being great later in the year, it hurts you. You get penalized for playing a team with injuries too. They might've been great to start but they fell off because of injury. Teams also get better as the season moves forward and there's no way to make up for those games really. You penalize a team playing great. You reward a team that might not be. We've been good late. But what happened 3 months ago is held over your head. It's a poor system.

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Originally Posted by Cooterpoot

Imagine sweeping a conference opponent and your RPI falls. Teams have no control over that.
We can only schedule our OOC games and we really hurt ourselves with both scheduling and performance in those games. Even if we schedule great, if teams end up not being great later in the year, it hurts you. You get penalized for playing a team with injuries too. They might've been great to start but they fell off because of injury. Teams also get better as the season moves forward and there's no way to make up for those games really. You penalize a team playing great. You reward a team that might not be. We've been good late. But what happened 3 months ago is held over your head. It's a poor system.

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It is a poor system for sure. Like has been said already, you should be able to drop two or three of your worst rpi opponents at year end and calculate from there.

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Originally Posted by Quaoarsking

Sure, or we could have not scheduled games against teams we knew would hurt our RPI and replaced them with teams that project into the 175-200 range, had the same 19-6 non-conference record, and we would be hosting right now.

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Question for you Q since you have the numbers. And I am assuming this is what you are talking about. For example say we play a 180 rpi team, at home of course, and lose. Or we play a 280 rpi team and win. How do those two scenarios compare?

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Originally Posted by Quaoarsking

Again ... I'm not saying you have to know exactly where someone's RPI is going to be every year. But yes, you can make a really good guess if someone's RPI is going to be in the bottom 50 or somewhere in the middle.

Xavier's RPI has been in the top 100 in 4 of the last 5 years and #101 in the year it wasn't. So yes, I would have expected Xavier to probably be in the top 100 again this year, or worst case in the 150 - 200 range. Big East teams don't generally get much worse than that.

On the other hand, Alcorn State, North Alabama, and Mt. St. Mary's were always going to have terrible RPIs. Year in year out, most of the ASUN and MAAC are worse than 200 - Mt. St. Mary's actually had a winning conference record and still had an RPI of 284. Even if they had turned out to be unexpectedly good and won their conferences (which there was no reason to expect, but is always possible I guess), the best case scenario was going to be that those games were a wash for us. The SWAC is even worse. Every SWAC school is worse than 200, with 5 of the 12 (including Alcorn State as usual) in the bottom 15.

Again, you and Coach 34 are literally arguing with math. And it doesn't even make sense. Why are you being so defensive about this? Did your relative schedule the Mt. St. Mary's series or something? Our athletic department screwed up when we scheduled that series because all indications, everything we knew going into it, suggested it would drag down our RPI, and it did. We should 100% adopt a "smart scheduling" mindset where we try to maximize our RPI, project teams are going to help our RPI the most, and use that in filling it out.

Edit: Todd directly acknowledges in the post that we dropped a couple of ranks by beating North Alabama. I listed 4 other games against teams with worse RPIs than North Alabama. So even if he doesn't understand the guts of RPI calculation, he gets the concept that you can lose 2 ranks by playing 1 team with an RPI that bad. So what happens when we play 5 games against teams that bad? And we know historical RPIs of these teams and know that those schools are consistently this bad, that it wasn't some freak fluke thing? You're basically there, Todd. You're not a disloyal fan or anything if you just acknowledge the numbers for what they are.

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Accuses me of arguing with math. Then admits that our RPI would be 9 had we won all of our games in the very next post. So in other words win the games and you minimize any hit.

I'm laughing at you because you don't get it and won't get it. Maybe you will if Arkansas State is RPI 200+ next year which is possible.

Hasn't it been posted here many times by many of our learned "experts" in this RPI formula, that if you schedule a tougher opponent and lose, the RPI fall is minimal? But you can even beat a cupcake (that we seem to have scheduled too many of), and still fall? And Heaven forbid you lose to said cupcakes ( and at home games of course) you fall off the RPI cliff. Or was this a basketball only formula? Color me confused.

Post from Todd:

QUOTE=Todd4State;1582351]I don't really understand why MSU fans always run down the OOC schedule other than we like to see good baseball games. And it seems like every time we play someone like Arizona they have a down year and end up being a RPI killer.

None of this really matters much. How we do in SEC play will determine our postseason fate. It's fun to look at RPI but our true magic number is 13 SEC wins.

As far as this year we would be dumb to play a killer schedule OOC. We're rebuilding our pitching staff and four weeks to build some confidence and figure out roles is what we need to do.
[/QUOTE]

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Originally Posted by Todd4State

And now for the kill shot.

Tennessee- RPI in top 10 and SOS worse than MSU.

https://www.warrennolan.com/baseball...dule/Tennessee

What's the difference? 24-2 in OOC play. Win your OOC games and your RPI goes up. Period. Good night.

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But did they lose 5 Quad 4 games to these teams? We win against these type teams, no problem and no discussion. We seemed to think we could just beat these teams based on the name on our jerseys for several of these games. Coming off the '22 and '23 seasons this is squarely on the Coaching staff and players for sleep walking through several of these mid-week games. Winning solves most all problems.

Coach34:

QUOTE=Coach34;1582279]This. We'll have a top SOS at the end of the season. Every SEC team will.

23-3 OOC is very realistic when you consider last year's team was 18-5 OOC[/QUOTE]


I could go on and on, but I won't.

It's not hard to say, I was wrong, hoops and others were right. Lemo screwed up.

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Originally Posted by Todd4State

Tourneys are invitation only. They like to have different teams- and we have played in a lot of them recently. We'll be back in some soon but it's not something that is completely in our control.

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Doubt we were an attractive tourney invite after '22 and '23. Might hurt the RPI of the good teams in said tourney to lose to us by arguments on this thread.****

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Originally Posted by Todd4State

Accuses me of arguing with math. Then admits that our RPI would be 9 had we won all of our games in the very next post. So in other words win the games and you minimize any hit.

I'm laughing at you because you don't get it and won't get it. Maybe you will if Arkansas State is RPI 200+ next year which is possible.

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Yes, you are arguing with math because for some reason you think I'm attacking Lemonis over this (I'm not, it's just numbers) and you want to reflexively defend him.

Asking the team to go 25-0 in the non-conference is unrealistic. Every baseball team drops a couple of games here and there. Yes, Texas A&M didn't lose a non-conference game so far this year, but they're the only one in the country out of 305. Last year it was just 1 team (Virginia). In 2022 it was nobody. It's not something you can realistically expect even a great team to do.

On the other hand, asking the athletic department not schedule games that we know with high certainty will hurt our RPI is realistic, or at the very least don't schedule FIVE of them. That's an easy problem to fix. Whoever is in charge of scheduling baseball games hurt this team before the season even started, and probably took away a hosting bid from us.

Again, it's really bizarre that you're arguing against this. Did you hit your head this morning? Did your wife schedule the Mt. St. Mary's series? It's just basic mathematics of the RPI formula, something we've all understood for years and discussed many times in the decade+ this season has existed, including as recently as a week ago, discussions which you participated in and agreed that scheduling North Alabama was a bad idea (!)

Here's a summary for those who don't want to read the whole thread:



"Hey guys I've run the numbers and found out an easy way we could have had a better RPI just with smarter scheduling. We should do that going forward."

"THAT'S NOT TRUE! YOU'RE MAKING THAT UP!"

"No, it is. I have an Excel model and replaced the games to measure the impact."

"NO! IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO HAVE KNOWN THAT PROGRAMS LIKE MT. ST. MARY'S AND ALCORN STATE WOULD HAVE HAD SUCH BAD RPIS! NO ONE COULD HAVE PREDICTED THAT, NOT EVEN KENDALL ROGERS!"

"Actually, those teams routinely have really bad RPIs, so we had a pretty good idea that they would again this year. If we had just aimed for teams in that 150-200 range we would be hosting."

"NO! THE SCHEDULE WAS FINE! WE SHOULD HAVE JUST GONE 25-0 AGAINST THE NON-CONFERENCE PORTION!"

"I mean, yeah, that would have helped our RPI, but that's not very realistic. And even if we had gone 25-0, it still would have been better to not play 5 games against teams that would plummet our RPI. And didn't you agree with me on this like a week ago, only to flip on this thread?"

"YOU JUST DON'T UNDERSTAND!!!"

Delete

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Originally Posted by Goldendawg

But did they lose 5 Quad 4 games to these teams? We win against these type teams, no problem and no discussion. We seemed to think we could just beat these teams based on the name on our jerseys for several of these games. Coming off the '22 and '23 seasons this is squarely on the Coaching staff and players for sleep walking through several of these mid-week games. Winning solves most all problems.

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Exactly. Good to see someone gets it.

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Originally Posted by Quaoarsking

Yes, you are arguing with math because for some reason you think I'm attacking Lemonis over this (I'm not, it's just numbers) and you want to reflexively defend him.

Asking the team to go 25-0 in the non-conference is unrealistic. Every baseball team drops a couple of games here and there. Yes, Texas A&M didn't lose a non-conference game so far this year, but they're the only one in the country out of 305. Last year it was just 1 team (Virginia). In 2022 it was nobody. It's not something you can realistically expect even a great team to do.

On the other hand, asking the athletic department not schedule games that we know with high certainty will hurt our RPI is realistic, or at the very least don't schedule FIVE of them. That's an easy problem to fix. Whoever is in charge of scheduling baseball games hurt this team before the season even started, and probably took away a hosting bid from us.

Again, it's really bizarre that you're arguing against this. Did you hit your head this morning? Did your wife schedule the Mt. St. Mary's series? It's just basic mathematics of the RPI formula, something we've all understood for years and discussed many times in the decade+ this season has existed, including as recently as a week ago, discussions which you participated in and agreed that scheduling North Alabama was a bad idea (!)

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Where am I defending Lemonis in any of this? My annoyance is every year fans like you bitch about our easy OOC schedule no matter what and if we win it takes care of itself. And lo and behold we sit here with 17 SEC wins and are in the thick of the hosting conversation. So no- I wasn't wrong. You are. And you decided to call me out even though you were wrong while repeatedly ignoring the examples I provided that show you were obviously wrong. We didn't win enough so our RPI didn't get high enough. We beat Central Arkansas and South Alabama and we're fine.

I do agree it's unrealistic to expect a team to go 26-0 OOC. However it's not unrealistic to expect us to go 22-4 or 23-3. And had that happened our RPI would have been much higher. The fact that your own data shows you that the ceiling of our schedule is a RPI of 9 in and of itself proves you wrong but you don't get it. So now you're stuck making up BS about my wife wanting us to play St. Mary's because you can't even defend your own findings.

So again- no we're not here because of our schedule. We're here because the team didn't beat what was on the schedule enough. You think you can "game" RPI and you really can't. Which is why you still haven't told me who we should schedule next year yet. And won't be able to because I actually understand RPI and you clearly have no clue. It's actually pretty funny. You're like someone declaring the Earth is really flat because that's what it looks like to your eye but everyone else knows you're wrong.

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Originally Posted by Quaoarsking

Here's a summary for those who don't want to read the whole thread:



"Hey guys I've run the numbers and found out an easy way we could have had a better RPI just with smarter scheduling. We should do that going forward."

"THAT'S NOT TRUE! YOU'RE MAKING THAT UP!"

"No, it is. I have an Excel model and replaced the games to measure the impact."

"NO! IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO HAVE KNOWN THAT PROGRAMS LIKE MT. ST. MARY'S AND ALCORN STATE WOULD HAVE HAD SUCH BAD RPIS! NO ONE COULD HAVE PREDICTED THAT, NOT EVEN KENDALL ROGERS!"

"Actually, those teams routinely have really bad RPIs, so we had a pretty good idea that they would again this year. If we had just aimed for teams in that 150-200 range we would be hosting."

"NO! THE SCHEDULE WAS FINE! WE SHOULD HAVE JUST GONE 25-0 AGAINST THE NON-CONFERENCE PORTION!"

"I mean, yeah, that would have helped our RPI, but that's not very realistic. And even if we had gone 25-0, it still would have been better to not play 5 games against teams that would plummet our RPI. And didn't you agree with me on this like a week ago, only to flip on this thread?"

"YOU JUST DON'T UNDERSTAND!!!"

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Here's the real summary:

Quaors doesn't understand RPI and his own findings prove him hilariously wrong so now he is blaming Todd4State's wife for scheduling St. Mary's and creating straw men while trying to ignore Todd4State's examples that also prove Quoars wrong.

But no one is buying it.

Schedule:

Austin Peay tied for their conference title- 35-19 this season
Evansville tied for 2nd in their conference
MSM finished 4th in their conference
Air Force won the Mountain West
Samford finished 2nd in their conference
New Orleans was 3rd in their conference
Southern Miss was 2nd/Georgia Southern was 4th

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Originally Posted by Todd4State

Quaors doesn't understand RPI and his own findings prove him hilariously wrong so now he is blaming Todd4State's wife for scheduling St. Mary's .

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You finally tricked that chick into marrying you? Good job

My future son-n-law will be joining you in Nola at work this Fall- maybe my daughter as well. Both are pharmacists

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Originally Posted by Coach34

You finally tricked that chick into marrying you? Good job

My future son-n-law will be joining you in Nola at work this Fall- maybe my daughter as well. Both are pharmacists

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LOL. No not yet. She has said the "hey let's go look in that jewelry store though.

If they're pharmacists there is a chance I'll run across them in NOLA. It's an awesome city. I love it!