Most college sports involve early season non-conference games that are designed to get the teams in shape and get ready for conference play. Sometimes the goal is primarily preparation but sometimes those games are influenced by local rivalry, recruiting or giving a past assistant a game against better competition. For the “non-power conference” teams in D1 it can be a helpful recruiting tool to play the local tier 1 team or to travel to a “big school”. I would think those games are not limited to the ACC and, if anything, they hurt RPI. It is a trade off for experience etc. that a team plays a likely lower RPI team; Just like football and b-ball do. Lastly, not every team has their top 11 ironed out after a few weeks of practice, so it isn’t just to get playing time that there are early season games involving a lot of subs.