Everyone who was concerned about our schedule has been proven correct

[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.

[Quaoarsking]

You really think playing Arkansas State would have made that much of a difference? Seriously? That's what you're going with here? LOL. Their RPI was 211. Northwestern State was RPI 179. It's all quadrant four. Re-arranging deck chairs for the same result.

Yes. As in I literally have an Excel RPI workbook on my computer and replaced our wins over Mt. St. Mary's with wins over Arkansas State and it raised our RPI by 8-10 slots (give or take, because everyone else's schedules would have changed and it ripples out from there) just by switching those out. That's my point that I've said several times. We DON'T have to play a bunch of great teams to have a better RPI. Just swap out teams in the 275+ range with teams in the 175-200 range. It's just math.

When you find that crystal ball to game RPI let Chris Lemonis know. In fact why don't you tell me right now who is going to have a satisfactory RPI and what it will be right now?

Like I said, I wouldn't criticize our athletic department if we played a team that was usually in the 100s and just randomly happened to be in the 300s or high 200s this year. I picked those 3 schools on purpose because they consistently have terrible RPIs.

Also explain how come when we played and beat Mizzou our RPI didn't go down Thursday or Friday? That in and of itself proves you wrong right there.

Missouri's RPI is around 100. Mt. St. Mary's is around 300. I honestly am flabbergasted that you don't grasp the difference here.

[Quaoarsking]

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.

You participated in threads where we talked about how the Alcorn State and North Alabama wins hurt our RPI. You were one of the people who said we needed to cancel the North Alabama game because it would hurt our RPI. What is even going on here?

It's not just that you're literally arguing with math, it's that you understood this all along this season until tonight, when you suddenly felt the calling to defend the honor of our athletic department or something?

[Coach34]

Damn Todd gonna get arrested for beating a poor soul like a slave from the 1830's

[SpaceBully]

Yeah, but that was my point preseason. Just a decent non con and we are hosting. It was a scared schedule aimed to save his jobs or stack wins. It was not a schedule built to maximize RPI.

....normally play against some decent competition in those events, but probably for same reason you said.....Lemon was too scared to play in a tourney against good teams. This was easily our weakest OOC schedule in my memory. Need to get back in a tourney next year......@ Houston, @ Frisco, @ Arlington or any in Florida or the West Coast. Would be cool to get back into the Dodger Classic in LA. I think we played there a few years ago vs OK, UCLA, and USC.

[TheLostDawg]

....normally play against some decent competition in those events, but probably for same reason you said.....Lemon was too scared to play in a tourney against good teams. This was easily our weakest OOC schedule in my memory. Need to get back in a tourney next year......@ Houston, @ Frisco, @ Arlington or any in Florida or the West Coast. Would be cool to get back into the Dodger Classic in LA. I think we played there a few years ago vs OK, UCLA, and USC.

We went from playing Texas tech in Gulfport to a mixed bag with new orleans and South Alabama, one of those games a loss. Very weak ooc schedule and I see why he did that. We are obviously keeping Lemonis but we can't keep playing scared turtle when it comes to schedule.

[BrunswickDawg]

....normally play against some decent competition in those events, but probably for same reason you said.....Lemon was too scared to play in a tourney against good teams. This was easily our weakest OOC schedule in my memory. Need to get back in a tourney next year......@ Houston, @ Frisco, @ Arlington or any in Florida or the West Coast. Would be cool to get back into the Dodger Classic in LA. I think we played there a few years ago vs OK, UCLA, and USC.

If I recall correctly (and I may not, but apparently Hoops has the almighty receipts so he can let me know) - this was the point I argued about RPI. Our schedule, both non-con and conference have not been bad. Our OOC SOS is 143 and RPI is 57. Go back to 2022 when we were getting our asses kicked as defending national champ and we had a non-con SOS at 275 and RPI of 174. That is a shit schedule and we lost 9 times in OOC play. I know there are other seasons like that out there - and I pointed out '91 when we were literally playing NAIA and DII schools and losing to them.

Other than MSM - which I think is a legit schedule complaint - we played teams we have played regularly going back decades. And as I pointed out, have lost to a number times and it not really effected our post season chances. As always it's about winning games. winning against MSM vs. someone else with a lower RPI likely wouldn't have changed that - because at the end of the day we lost too many games.

Frankly, with the unknowns we had coming into the season, I don't think our scheduling was a bad approach.

[Todd4State]

Yes. As in I literally have an Excel RPI workbook on my computer and replaced our wins over Mt. St. Mary's with wins over Arkansas State and it raised our RPI by 8-10 slots (give or take, because everyone else's schedules would have changed and it ripples out from there) just by switching those out. That's my point that I've said several times. We DON'T have to play a bunch of great teams to have a better RPI. Just swap out teams in the 275+ range with teams in the 175-200 range. It's just math.


Like I said, I wouldn't criticize our athletic department if we played a team that was usually in the 100s and just randomly happened to be in the 300s or high 200s this year. I picked those 3 schools on purpose because they consistently have terrible RPIs.



Missouri's RPI is around 100. Mt. St. Mary's is around 300. I honestly am flabbergasted that you don't grasp the difference here.

And again you don't understand that RPI is completely random and an unknown before the season. I'm flabbergasted that you don't understand that. We have literally played people like Arizona before and their RPI ended up being 100. And I provided multiple examples of teams that had RPI's in the top 100 that were no name teams like Xavier. Still waiting on you tell me who is going to be RPI top 100 next year. You can't. Chris Lemonis can't. Kendall Rogers can't. That's my point.

When we played North Alabama and won our RPI dropped 2 spots. That's it. That literally just happened.

[Homedawg]

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.

This is a fact. If take away the bad losses, we are fine.

[Todd4State]

You participated in threads where we talked about how the Alcorn State and North Alabama wins hurt our RPI. You were one of the people who said we needed to cancel the North Alabama game because it would hurt our RPI. What is even going on here?

It's not just that you're literally arguing with math, it's that you understood this all along this season until tonight, when you suddenly felt the calling to defend the honor of our athletic department or something?

I did say that about North Alabama and our RPI dropped two points. That was also before the alleged memo came out about dropping teams to help RPI came out about the NCAA committee penalizing teams for doing so.

I've already provided examples of teams with lower SOS than MSU but had higher RPI's. You win games your RPI goes up. You lose to Central Arkansas it gets damaged. Badly.

[Todd4State]

....normally play against some decent competition in those events, but probably for same reason you said.....Lemon was too scared to play in a tourney against good teams. This was easily our weakest OOC schedule in my memory. Need to get back in a tourney next year......@ Houston, @ Frisco, @ Arlington or any in Florida or the West Coast. Would be cool to get back into the Dodger Classic in LA. I think we played there a few years ago vs OK, UCLA, and USC.

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.

[Bdawg]

For the trillionth time, nobody is saying that we should have played really tough teams and lost to them. We just scheduled really weak teams in the sub-200 range that really ranked our RPI. Replace these 5 games (all 275 or worse):
3 vs. Mt. St. Mary's
1 vs. Alcorn State
1 vs. North Alabama

With teams who are around the 175-200 range, and our RPI is 8-10 spots higher. I just ran the calculation. We'd be safely hosting right now, not praying to make a deep run and then maybe have a shot. We'd still be playing bad teams that we should easily beat (you never know in baseball, but you never know with the 275-300 range either), but our RPI would be much better off. ETA: Even if we'd gone 4-1 against those 5 replacement teams instead of 5-0, we'd be much better off RPI-wise.

We've known for decades (literally) in any sport that playing teams in the high 100s doesn't tank your RPI, while playing teams in the high 200s does, and unless you suck, you shouldn't have a problem beating either, yet in every sport we continue to schedule like idiots.

Wasn?t north Alabama the last non con? What were they going to do if we canceled it? Factor it in like we played?

[Bdawg]

Quaoarsking, what do the numbers say if we won all our non-con? Just curious if you don’t mind? This may settle the beef. I didn’t like our weak non-con either, but I can understand if you win them all it won’t hurt that bad. But if you happen to lose to some, I can only assume it’s much better to lose to team in 100-150 range than a team in 200+ range.

[DawgFromOxford]

Both arguments can be true right?

Had we not lost so many poorly ranked OOC games I?m assuming we would be hosting regardless of who we scheduled.

Even with the losses we have, had we scheduled historically better RPI teams im assuming we would still probably be hosting.

[HoopsDawg]

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.

Haha, yeah, I mean if we had gone undefeated in the non conference our RPI would be higher. Same as if we had swept Arkansas on the road. That's not the point.

[Quaoarsking]

And again you don't understand that RPI is completely random and an unknown before the season. I'm flabbergasted that you don't understand that. We have literally played people like Arizona before and their RPI ended up being 100. And I provided multiple examples of teams that had RPI's in the top 100 that were no name teams like Xavier. Still waiting on you tell me who is going to be RPI top 100 next year. You can't. Chris Lemonis can't. Kendall Rogers can't. That's my point.

When we played North Alabama and won our RPI dropped 2 spots. That's it. That literally just happened.

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.

[Quaoarsking]

Quaoarsking, what do the numbers say if we won all our non-con? Just curious if you don’t mind? This may settle the beef. I didn’t like our weak non-con either, but I can understand if you win them all it won’t hurt that bad. But if you happen to lose to some, I can only assume it’s much better to lose to team in 100-150 range than a team in 200+ range.

If we had gone 25-0 in the non-conference instead of 19-6, I have our RPI at #9.

Or if we hadn't scheduled Mt. St. Mary's, North Alabama, or Alcorn State and replaced them with teams around #200, and then gone 25-0, our RPI could have been #6. (It's hard to improve much in the rankings at the highest levels because teams aren't bunched together anymore.)

But the thing is that almost no one ever goes literally undefeated in the non-conference. (Texas A&M did this year, and that's a key reason why they're #1, in addition to a great SEC record.) We can't really count on that. What we can count on is not scheduling games that we know are very likely to hurt our RPI. It would have been very easy to schedule someone other than Mt. St. Mary's for a weekend series. Is it possible that that replacement team could have surprisingly been terrible and hurt us anyway? Sure. But we knew that even in a best case scenario that a program like Mt. St. Mary's wasn't going to be able to have a good enough RPI not to hurt us.

[Bdawg]

If we had gone 25-0 in the non-conference instead of 19-6, I have our RPI at #9.

Or if we hadn't scheduled Mt. St. Mary's, North Alabama, or Alcorn State and replaced them with teams around #200, and then gone 25-0, our RPI could have been #6. (It's hard to improve much in the rankings at the highest levels because teams aren't bunched together anymore.)

But the thing is that almost no one ever goes literally undefeated in the non-conference. (Texas A&M did this year, and that's a key reason why they're #1, in addition to a great SEC record.) We can't really count on that. What we can count on is not scheduling games that we know are very likely to hurt our RPI. It would have been very easy to schedule someone other than Mt. St. Mary's for a weekend series. Is it possible that that replacement team could have surprisingly been terrible and hurt us anyway? Sure. But we knew that even in a best case scenario that a program like Mt. St. Mary's wasn't going to be able to have a good enough RPI not to hurt us.

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.

[Cooterpoot]

RPI is a terrible metric with some lack of transparency. It's used by the NCAA to do whatever they want. Our other programs have been sent out west already, don't be surprised if baseball is sent there too. It's a BS system but we didn't do anything to help ourselves. Too much SWAC and not enough Swag.

[Quaoarsking]

RPI is a terrible metric with some lack of transparency. It's used by the NCAA to do whatever they want. Our other programs have been sent out west already, don't be surprised if baseball is sent there too. It's a BS system but we didn't do anything to help ourselves. Too much SWAC and not enough Swag.

Agree that it's a terrible metric. It is not very predictive.

Disagree that it's not transparent. Anyone can build their own model to "check" the results although admittedly it's tough to know exactly which games count as home vs. neutral.

Despite all of that, the #1 takeaway is that it is manipulable. We could schedule in a way to maximize our RPI, but we don't. This exact team with its same record could have a better RPI, one that's good enough to host, without changing anything about our performance. We should be doing that in every sport that uses RPI. We should be looking to manipulate the NET to our advantage in basketball too.