2018 Colorado Buffaloes

Sure seems like they were this year. Colorado plays three neighbors every year ... Denver, and two of Colorado State, Northern Colorado, Air Force or Colorado College. And perhaps by now CSU will be annual. But that still leaves several games to play some teams at least at our level. When I first saw this year's non-conference schedule, I thought it was challenging enough. Marquette is consistently a playoff team, turned out not to be this year. Michigan State was having a great season until they played us, after that it kind of faded. Missouri was always a formidable opponent from our Big-12 years. How would we have done against a difficult schedule? We'll never know.

But with a win over Utah, maybe even a tie, we would not be having this conversation. Or a tie with UCLA, a team we did outplay. Woulda, coulda, shoulda, didn't.

 

Yeah, a Missouri team who finished ahead of Miss. State in the SEC.
And Colorado drilled them 6-0, LOL.

Miss. State wins 2 out of their last 10 games of the regular season.
As a result, they finish in 12th place in their conference.

Georgetown gets a #1 seed. If the committee respects their conference (Big East) enough to give Georgetown a #1 seed, then why isn't the 2nd best team from the Big East in the tournament (Butler?).

It's laughable that no one else from the Big East other than Georgetown makes the tournament. That means their conference was a joke according to the committee. But yet, Georgetown gets a #1 seed over USC (who is a #4 seed all of a sudden). LOL.

USC would pummel Georgetown, just like they did in the 2016 College Cup.
UCLA would also pummel Georgetown.

Georgetown plays a lousy schedule.
And they still didn't win 3 of those games on that schedule (3 draws).
Baylor is better than Georgetown.

Georgetown might be a Top 15 team (they'd finish maybe 5th in the ACC).
Georgetown is not a Top 4 team, period.

 

Georgetown played a much tougher non-conference slate than USC and got better results. That's the difference. The committee doesn't penalize you for playing in a shitty conference. Unfortunately for USC their schedule ended up weaker than it would have been in a normal year because Florida, Pepperdine and LBSU all underperformed. Likewise, the committee doesn't penalize you for playing in a particularly tough conference. They won't dock you for "good" losses. As long as you have strong wins and stay above .500, it seems that Top 50 losses aren't held against you, which makes sense.

Georgetown top 50 non-conference results: #43 Virginia Tech (tie), #11 Duke (tie), #6 West Virginia (win), #35 George Mason (win), #24 Princeton (win),

USC top 50 non-conference results: #48 Pepperdine (win), #37 Long Beach State (win), #2 Florida State (tie)

 

It is not always about playing non conference power5 teams and getting wins. Colorado will get those chances in conference play. They need to play non conference opponents with higher winning percentage. That is the largest part of RPI (50%). Colorado had one non conference opponent
win more than 6 games, that hurt their RPI. Michigan State last in Big 10, Iowa State 9th in Big 12, Missouri 10th in SEC are not games that will help them as much as you think. Play mid major conference champions who will win 10+ games.

Miss State beat 4 teams with 12 or more wins and two teams with 8 wins all out of conference. That is why their RPI is so high.

Though no one can predict how many games a team will win future years when scheduling, Miss State did a good job scheduling the likes of La Tech (avg 13 wins over last 4 years) Central Arkansas (avg 12 wins over last 4 years), then got lucky that Southern Miss had such good year. All that and a win vs Memphis and South Carolina is why they finished 17 in the RPI. Two results is all it took.

RPI is a little bit of a science, but it is used so rather than get mad about it coaches need to learn how to use it to their advantage if they are in a power 5 school. ACC 10 teams in and SEC 9 teams in, they seem to have it figured out. They have a lot more teams to schedule that will win 10+ games that I think some of the Pac12 schools do.

 

Georgetown is quite a bit better than Butler--played a tougher schedule, beat Butler twice. As Outsider notes, if you get a couple of good results against, say, top 30 RPI teams, play a good schedule and don't have any bad losses, you will have a good RPI. There are always a couple/few outliers whose RPI is more impressive than their record.

 

At the end of the day it will all hash out and very well could see 3 pac12 teams in the CC

 

That's the problem with the Pac 12: they use UCLA, Stanford and USC to rationalize all their own shortcomings. At the end of the day, it will hash out and the success of those three teams doesn't mean squat for Colorado or any other team in the Pac 12. It means the top 3 teams are really good.

 

gold-medal winner

 

Those three teams are above the rest and we all know, but so you’re saying the middle tier teams in ACC, SEC, Big 10/12 are better than Pac’s?
WSU, Colorado, and Oregon finished the non conference schedule with combined of 1 loss. They are not good teams because they beat each others out in conference play?
The fact that out of 32 at large spots, only 5 are from west coast is a joke to me.

 

Interesting if you watched twics today Danny eluded to a much more difficult non con schedule next. I think he mentioned 3 are currently in the top 20

 

Interesting that for tonight's starting line-up for DU vs. Arizona, 10 of the 11 are from Colorado. I wonder if any were recruited by CU.

 

And that should have been the case. It seemed like Colorado's RPI didnt boost at all with that 1-0 loss to the #2 team and the 2-1 loss to the top 10 team. Of course, the Utah game was the nail in coffin. I still think the overall system is flawed in that some teams that should have clearly run away with their conference tournament, ended up losing to a team that shouldnt even be in the postseason. Its crazy that a team like LSU is still in this. Maybe certain teams that were already shoe in's for the post season, decided to rest some girls in their tournament matches and didnt care if they won or lost. Thats a strategy for a completely different discussion....but I do wonder about that. Oh well, I guess it all boils down to the top 4 teams anyways and those teams are pretty consistent every year.

 

From the RPI's perspective, a loss is a loss, it doesn't matter what the score was even if it was an overtime loss. That's because the NCAA has a specific policy that it will not consider score differential (now slightly modified for basketball only).

Colorado's schedule would have been ok if it had better Pac 12 results, but when you're in a tough conference like that you have to take into consideration that your in-conference results might not be good enough to get you into the NCAA Tournament. In that case, you need to have enough good non-conference results to get you in. And, by that I don't mean results that will help you have a good RPI, I mean good results (wins and ties) against Top 50 teams. As Colorado's non-conference schedule turned out, they had no good results against Top 50 teams because as it turned out their non-conference schedule didn't include any top 50 teams.

Scheduling for a team like Colorado is a risk/reward analysis business. You need to schedule to have a good RPI, but you also need to schedule to get some significant good results against Top 50 teams even though you know you're not going to get good results against all the Top 50 teams you play. I'm sure Danny is thinking about this, possibly even thinking about ditching the "tournament" against Colorado teams every year.

 

Thats a good point...that colorado tournament might be best played in the spring. Its a great cause, but not at the risk of not getting into the post season.

 

Having the Colorado Cup involve all six teams playing each other would likely be RPI suicide for the Buffs. I think our choices are the current format, or no Cup at all. Denver and Colorado State on the schedule every year, for sure. I think we've played Denver every year since I started following the team in 2008, and it's been competitive, Denver won four years in a row.

 

I'm a little partial in favor of Colorado, so I did a little review of some numbers I track. These are based on the last 11 years:

1. Average rank of opponents:

For unseeded teams that get at large selections to the NCAA Tournament, the average ARPI rank of their opponents is #89.

For unseeded Top 60 teams (the only ones in consideration for at large selections) that don't get at large selections, the average rank of their opponents is #115.

For Colorado this year, the average rank of their opponents was 113.7.

2. Number of ARPI Top 60 opponents:

For teams that get at large selections to the NCAA Tournament (whether seeded or not), the average number of Top 60 opponents is 9 and the median also is 9.

For Top 60 teams that don't get at large selections, the average number of Top 60 opponents is 6.2 and the median is 7.

For Colorado this year, its number of Top 60 opponents was 7.

These numbers are publicly available at the RPI for Division I Women's Soccer website on the NCAA Tournament: Scheduling Towards the Tournament page. That page is a resource specifically designed as a scheduling resource for coaches.

 

My tournament ended quickly. The Buffs got screwed, in my TOTALLY biased opinion. West Virginia (my father was a Mountaineer, class of 1928) lost at home to Wake Forest on penalty kicks. Santa Clara outshot North Carolina State 25-3 and lost on penalty kicks. All done.