The ACC 2018

What an awful collective showing by the conference.

It's now been four seasons since an ACC school won a national title. Since Clemson won its first national title in 84, the ACC has only gone more than 4 years without a national title one time - 95-00 - so this is a a pretty poor collective run.

While this is probably a fluke, it will be interesting if this leads to any changes like going after more players who will stay four years or going after fewer/more international players or playing more road non-conference games.

 

Obviously the solution is to offer Stanford membership to the conference.

 

Or JMU!

 

Now that is funny. Absurd enough that a school much closer to Lake Michigan than the Atlantic Ocean should be in the ACC. But how far is Stanford from the Pacific Ocean? I have never been there... yet.

Sure. Why not? Have Stanford join the ACC as well. They can afford those travel costs.

 

Hopefully the committee decides to take into account how poor the RPI truly represents the teams that should be in the tournament. NC State for example shouldn't have been in this year or last.

They get in because of Wake, UNC, Louisville, Virginia, Va Tech, Notre Dame* and Duke (who should not have been a 6 seed). Not because they were one of the best 48 teams in the country. Creighton for example is and was a better team this year and missed the tournament because they were in the Big East.

For the record the top 4 or 5 teams in the ACC are very good. The teams that finish 7th and 8th don't deserve to be in the tournament year after year simply because they are in the ACC. It's a shame that there are some quality teams that miss out due to the fact that lesser teams bring their RPI down by being in that conference.

I'm not offering a solution, I'm trying to bring up a discussion to hopefully come up with one.

Please poke holes at this post as much as possible as I truly believe it's what will be best for all of college soccer.

 

So what ranking system do you prefer?

Please don't say that it's obvious how the teams should be ranked. If it was truly obvious, the committee would come to that ranking, and all of us would agree with it.

Fancier stat methods can improve on RPI, but not dramatically. This has been endlessly studied for basketball.

 

I think all will agree that it's an imperfect system, but there are few alternatives. One problem with the RPI is that NCAA soccer teams play relatively few games, that is, relative to basketball. As anyone who has studied statistics will tell you, "n" is incredibly important for accurate determinations. Doubtful that we'll ever find a better method.

That said, if I were ETSU, UTRGV, Seattle, or Wisconsin I'd be p!ssed.

 

There is already a rule that teams must finish prior to NCAA tourney with at least a .500 record to be eligible for said tourney.

Perhaps it is now time to install a % cap on individual conference. No more than 50% of a conference can go. Argue about the number. Maybe 60%.

Bottom line: NCAA MSOC desperately needs new blood.

 

It might make sense to go at least two deep into every conference before going so deep in the ACC for instance. Haven't done an analysis but thinking the second team in any conference could have taken on the fourth thru sixth ACC team with positive results. The outcomes in games in the ACC were often by a PK or a scrum goal. Dominance didn't exist. So true strength of the conference was likely not what RPI was.

 

My gut feeling with no research is no more than 4, or no more than 50%, whichever is larger.

I suppose a true stats nerd could collate the record of teams in the Tournament who were beyond those limits. Personal opinion - it means more for the college game as a whole for a team who is second in some lowly-regarded conference to go one-and-done in the tournament than a similar performance by a 5th-place team from a perennial power conference.

 

There aren't enough post-season games for these stats to be very reliable. Come back in a hundred years or so.

The perennial issue in rankings is record vs strength of schedule. RPI overweights strength of schedule, in the sense that losing a game can boost your RPI. But it is also true that teams that play tough schedules are generally better prepared for the NCAA tournament, so overweighting SOS makes some sense.

In basketball, the NCAA is switching from RPI to some fancy new index. We'll see how it does.

My biggest problem with the NCAA is lack of transparency. Their soccer RPI formula has various bonuses that they don't disclose. Every year, gauchodan reverse engineers what the bonuses must be. Why doesn't the NCAA just disclose them?? The formula for the new basketball index is also not disclosed, AFAIK.

Hockey is an NCAA sport that does things well, IMO. First, they use a transparent formula (essentially RPI, but constructed very differently than it is in soccer or basketball). Second, they select at-large teams strictly by this formula. The committee never ever deviates from it. They have some discretion in seeding and match-ups, to avoid round-one matches of teams from the same conference, to minimize travel, and to boost attendance, but no team is ever moved more than 3 slots in the rankings. I'd like to see all NCAA sports go this route.

 

And so the streak ends.

Despite having 6-7 and even sometimes eight teams in the Top Ten of the RPI most of the season, the ACC fails to send a team to the College Cup for the first time since 2000 after Notre Dame fell to Indiana.

It was a really impressive streak. But having it end in a sea of underachievement takes a bit of its luster away.

 

I tend to think this is just a statistical fluctuation for the ACC. Some years the bad breaks just pile up. As an Akron fan, I sure wouldn't want to have to play Wake again.

 

I know Wake has lost guys to MLS...any chance some of the ACC schools have gotten into situation in which key guys aren’t there to play 4 yrs and win titles?

 

1) This is a statistical fluctuation. ACC will be back as early as 2019. Bank on that, and don't sell your blue chip stocks.

2) ACC conference value had been artificially inflated, capturing RPI in a closed loop. It has been so for a decade IMO. Consider 2018 a bubble pop, a market correction, for ACC Men's Soccer.

The two argument points are not mutually exclusive. It is not a binary choice.

The more I think on it, having a % cap per conference would be very good for the evolution of NCAA Soccer. It is better that the second best team in whatever conference go to the dance for the first time in that program's history than it is for the seventh best ACC team to make yet another first round exit. New blood is required for growth to occur.

 

There is no carryover from year to year in RPI.

 

I did not even suggest there was.

 

I misunderstood "ACC conference value had been artificially inflated, capturing RPI in a closed loop".

 

RPI cannot be captured in a "closed loop". High average RPI for a conference is based on beating teams outside the conference.

 

I see.

Mediocre ACC teams are buoyed by the excellence at the top of the ACC table. Freaky things happen in conference play, in any conference. I suggest that James Madison is better than their RPI ranking, and that Syracuse is not as good as their RPI ranking. Because ACC is so large, with 12 teams, the ACC mostly plays ACC. That is the closed loop. I suggest limiting each conference to no more than 50% of its membership going to tourney.

 

If I remember well the split of the ACC in two divisions aimed at boosting the RPI of more of their teams. And since, it seems to work as more ACC teams entered into the top RPI rankings.
I do not have the stats since the split, but I remember we noticed it the following year.
Is my perception right?

 

No dog in this fight but the 6th team in the ACC did play a tougher schedule than the 3rd team in a weaker conference.

Out of conference play can be a tool to demonstrate the relative strengths of the teams.

Are there examples in which the 2nd or 3rd team in a conference had better OOC performance, or better yet, head to head?

I personally don’t think the argument gets won by arguing against big power conferences but by playing a strong enough OOC schedule to offset any conference RPI hit.

This is how it plays out in football every year.

While I may not fully agree with all of it, it is a frame of reference.

 

Here are the non-con games ACC teams played against teams in the Top 50 of the RPI.

Boston College - @ 20. Rhode Island, @ 24. Connecticut
Clemson - @ 31. Creighton, 49. Coastal Carolina
Duke - 15. Georgetown, 27. High Point,
Louisville - @ 5. Kentucky, @ 15. Georgetown, 16. Charlotte
North Carolina - 2. Indiana, 41. UNC Wilmington, 43. East Tennessee, @ 48. Old Dominion
NC State - @ 14. Akron, 38. James Madison, @ 41. UNC Wilmington
Notre Dame - 2. Indiana, vs. 24. Connecticut, @ 28. Michigan, 33. Michigan State, vs. 40. Dartmouth
Pittsburgh - @ 14. Akron, @ 21. West Virginia, 45. Colgate
Syracuse - @ 14. Akron, @ 29. Oregon State, @ 36. Portland, 45. Colgate, @ 50. Cornell
Virginia - vs. 12 Maryland, 17. Denver, 18. New Hampshire, 35. Wright State
Virginia Tech - @ 13. Central Florida, vs. 26. Air Force,
Wake Forest - 2. Indiana, 27. High Point and 43. East Tennessee

With the exception of Clemson, everyone in the ACC played at least one Top 20 team and most teams left home to play top 50 teams at least once.

Also, some games got cancelled because of weather so some teams lost some chances for other top 50 games.

The point is, the ACC didn't just get their collective high RPI by playing each other. They all played good teams and, for the most part, won those games then helped their W-L-T by mostly beating teams outside the top 50.

So I don't think their RPI was inflated. It was earned. They just underachieved in the NCAA Tournament.