In the San Diego Section, the top 20 teams (based on a Power Rankings weighted average over the last few years) are placed in Division 1 at the start of the season. At the end of regular play (usually tournaments, non-league, and 8 or 10 Home and Away League games) the top 8 in the current year Power Ranking are placed in Open Playoff; the remaining 12 play in Division 1. In all the lower divisions (2-5) some teams are left out of the playoff bracket (typically 12 out of 20+ play on). Power Rankings as used by the section are similar to but less sophisticated in a sense than NCAA RPI. Each game played is assigned points (34 to 50) depending on the result, the opponents division (and thus long-term strength), and current year's WLT record. In the end, the average of all of a team's games determines the playoff assignments. http://www.cifsds.org/power-rankings.html The League games can be interesting because the League assignments are based more on tradition and geography than on strength, so a given league may be composed of teams assigned to two or three divisions.
I recall the committee throwing a bone to a west coast team that didn't make the cut in the name of Cal, and you think there is bias is still too hard to overcome? They put Cal over 10 other teams with higher RPIs (and arguments can be made that their quality of results made them deserving), but there is still bias because the committee didn't put a second west coast team over 10 other higher RPI teams.
In Ohio High School Soccer, all teams are mandated to participate in statewide post season tournament. Several years ago, a very small rural school elected to not participate in post season tournament. They had won only two or three games in two seasons. Many on the team had caught the Flu, so they figured they would just pass on the state tourney. Laughably, OHSAA forced them to bus to a seeded team’s field to take their 5-0 (or whatever) whooping.
If they were just throwing a bone to west coast teams, they could have picked Fullerton, Irvine or San Diego, all of whom had better records than Cal. The appearance is that they were just throwing a bone to the Pac12.
I should have addressed the "poet at heart" comment. When I was attending a tech college as a physics major, I was editor of the campus paper for a while (long story edited out here) and won first prize one year in the Spring Arts Festival ($50) for a free-verse entry of about 20 lines. Point of reference - the first prize "sculpture" that year was a half-dozen bricks mortared together, the remnants of a dorm-suite prank (another long story edited out here). One of my bucket list unaccomplished tasks is to suggest a better last stanza for Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" that preserves the rhyming structure of all the earlier stanzas.
The shift in the last stanza indicates the weariness of the speaker/driver, who is increasingly repetitive as sleep overtakes him. I would not change it at all. AABA BBCB CCDC DDDD https://www.shmoop.com/stopping-by-woods-on-a-snowy-evening/rhyme-form-meter.html
I'll take a stab at it: The woods are lovely, dark and deep. D But I have promises to keep, D With no more words to freakin' rhyme, E And miles to go before I sleep. D Edit: I think I've captured the weariness, but maybe I'm going to vote with Frost on this one.
I spent a good part of an all-day train trip trying to come up with a DDAD last stanza, wrapping the rhyme scheme around to the beginning stanza. As for the shmoop analysis/opinion - everybody's got one.
Back to the topic - I was working out yet another rating system until I realized it was very similar in results to RPI with 50-50-0 factors, and that the top 10 teams were the same as with the NCAA RPI. If I get ambitious this weekend, I will rebuild the calculations with an adjustable parameter to see how different weights work out.
Still in there pitching: The woods are lovely, dark and deep. D But I have promises to keep, D Don't change this line 'cuz that would blow, A And miles to go before I sleep. D
The woods are lovely, dark and deep. D But I have promises to keep, D But please do us a favor, though, A And miles to go before I sleep. D Too political?
The woods are lovely, dark and deep. D But I have promises to keep, D So circle back to though know snow, AAA And miles to go before I sleep. D And just in case poor Frost is not yet turning in his grave, my favorite so far: The woods are lovely, dark and deep. D But I have promises to keep, D So go slow, ho, throw snow no mo, AAAAAAAA And miles to go before I sleep. D
My apologies to this Big Soccer forum, to college soccer enthusiasts everywhere, and by extension, to the NCAA. Most of all, I humbly ask forgiveness of the Robert Frost Estate. (On second thought, screw the NCAA.)
My computer crashed and I had to reboot the first time I tried The woods are lovely, dark and deep. D But I have promises to keep, D With a hip, hop, the hippie to the hippie the hip-hop a hoppa ya don’t stop the rockin to the bang-bang-boogie said up jumps the boogie to the rhythm of the boogie the beat E And miles to go before I sleep. D
RPI reigns in this land. Men's hoops told it to pound sand. All other sports should do the same. To keep this old metric is lame.
NCAA Hockey still uses it, but only as one of the factors considered. Winning a game against a given opponent cancels out their higher RPI (although RPI has the strenght of the tie breaker after all factors are considered),
But year after year, for the top 16 that make the NCAA tournament, the hockey rankings by the "pairwise comparison" are almost exactly the same as the rankings by RPI. The two most recent discrepancies are both a swap of #13 and #14, which happened in the 2016-17 and 2014-15 seasons. https://www.collegehockeynews.com/ratings/pairwise/2019 Change the year to back to earlier seasons.