With only a month or so left in the regular season, I think it's a statement that the ACC and BIG are both having strong years. Of course, that doesn't mean that the National Champion will come from ACC/BIG. The conference tourneys and NCAA tourney always have a few surprises!
I missed a couple of games on Tuesday: USC Upstate 0, @ NC State 0 (2OT) Bucknell 0, @ Howard 0 (2OT) RPI has been adjusted accordingly.
So you'd reward mediocrity at the expense of the better teams? Virginia, Louisville and Clemson are currently 6, 8 and 10 in the RPI. But ACC teams are also 1, 2, 3 and 5. So you would not let three top ten teams to the NCAA tournament because of their conference affiliation? Ohio State and Wisconsin are currently 29 and 40 but their are 4 other Big Ten teams ahead of them. Should they just stop playing this season because they aren't in the top 4 of their conference even though the NCAA Tournament is a national competition? Punishing schools because they are in a strong soccer conference doesn't seem like a good way to reward merit.
"Merit" lasts one year. Let's look for the long-term health of the sport. As the calculations show, many of those conference also-rans get good RPI numbers because of their conference opponents' non-conference records, not on their own "merit"
You already get an automatic bid from some of these terrible conferences, which gives teams in those leagues something to play for. How does allowing a mediocre team into the tournament so they can get beat 3-0 in the first round help the overall health of the sport?
Alternatively, what I'd like to see happen is the ACC, Big Ten, Pac-12, Big East and maybe CUSA and the American Athletic Conference (and, ideally, a couple of rando schools like Akron and UCSB) break-away and form a top shelf division of college soccer and only play each other. Basically akin to 1-A and 1-AA in college football but with fewer teams in 1-A. Let them have more scholarships and play by rules more inclined to send top players to the pros. And let all the other schools in D-I carry on with the status quo or even go to fewer than 9.9 scholarships.
That said, how is the MAC RPI so strong? They’re 4th rated right now and close to overtaking the AAC as the 3rd best conference in the country. Not sure how to make sense of that.
Here would be the schools I'd put in 1-A in college soccer, with their current RPI and conference. A few are there on conference affiliation rather than merit and it leaves out a few currently good or traditionally strong programs but, it's a good starting point for discussion. 1. North Carolina – ACC 2. Notre Dame – ACC 3. Duke – ACC 4. Michigan State – Big Ten 5. Wake Forest – ACC 6. Virginia – ACC 7. Indiana – Big Ten 8. Louisville – ACC 9. Maryland – Big Ten 10. Clemson – ACC 14. Virginia Tech – ACC 16. Butler – Big East 17. Michigan – Big Ten 18. Old Dominion – CUSA 19. Southern Methodist – American 20. Georgetown – Big East 21. Florida International – CUSA 22. Akron – MAC (exemption) 25. Stanford – PAC-12 26. Kentucky – CUSA (for soccer) 27. South Florida - American 28. Pittsburgh – ACC 29. Ohio State – Big Ten 31. Creighton – Big East 33. UCLA – PAC-12 35. Tulsa – American 39. Wisconsin – Big Ten 40. Washington – PAC-12 44. California – PAC-12 47. Connecticut – American 52. West Virginia – MAC (for soccer; exemption) 53. Xavier – Big East 54. Charlotte – CUSA 56. New Mexico – CUSA (for soccer) 58. Boston College – ACC 59. Rutgers – Big Ten 61. Cincinnati – AAC 65. Alabama-Birmingham – CUSA 66. Syracuse – ACC 73. St. John’s – Big East 76. Villanova – Big East 77. NC State – ACC 100. UC Santa Barbara – Big West (exemption) 105. Central Florida - American 109. Northwestern – Big Ten 124. Penn State – Big Ten 134. South Carolina – CUSA (for soccer) 137. Temple – AAC 141. Providence – Big East 145. Marshall – CUSA 157. San Diego State – PAC-12 (for soccer) 160. Florida Atlantic – CUSA 162. Memphis – American 163. Marquette – Big East 166. Seton Hall – Big East 167. Oregon State – Pac-12 186. DePaul – Big East
A pair of games were postponed in the Bay Area tonight, due to air quality issues related to the fires in the Napa/Sonoma region to the northeast: Pacific at San Francisco Saint Mary's at Santa Clara
The NCAA waited until today to release its latest calculations, but for games through Oct. 15. In order to validate my rankings, I needed to temporarily delete last night's Horizon League result. Even after that, it still wasn't matching up until I discovered the NCAA had included a fake 0-0 draw between Holy Cross and American in addition to the actual 2-1 victory for AU. I've notified the NCAA...validation will have to wait!
Love the work that you've done here! I've spent several hours at work looking up stats and results through your page. The perfect cure to boredom.
The NCAA soccer guy usually responds to my e-mails. I do this for baseball and men's basketball as well, and I'll e-mail them too if I catch an error. I usually don't hear back but the corrections get made. I'll also e-mail conferences over their inaccurate standings...the MAAC had three errors in win-loss-draw records for a few weeks before I finally got sick of them and e-mailed them. And, of course, you guys catch my errors as well! Another e-mailer to me is South Carolina head coach Mark Berson...he watches me like a hawk! I feel really bad for him and the Gamecocks this season...didn't realize he's been there 38 years.