2020 Division I Ratings, Scheduling, Bracketology, Etc.

The Big West has announced it will not play its Fall sports, including soccer, during the 2020-21 season. They join the Ivy League so far as Fall sports are concerned.

 

Conference status report:

As of today, 19 conferences have at least one team showing up on other team non-conference schedules and I know that 1 other has teams that will be playing non-conference games. Some of these conferences have not announced their plans, but I think it is safe to assume all conferences with teams playing non-conference games also will have conference competitions. In addition, 5 other conferences have announced conference competion in the Spring, of which 2 will not play non-conference games and the other 3 have not indicated whether they will or will not. That makes a total of 25 conferences, of which 2 have said they will be conference only and 3 have not said yes or no on non-conference games.

That leaves 6 more conferences. Two of them -- the Ivy League and the Big West -- will not play at all during the 20-21 season. The remaining unknowns are the Big 10, Horizon, Metro Atlantic, and Patriot (although Army and Navy are able to play even if the rest of the conference does not), which we are waiting to hear from.

 

Here is a statement from the Big 10 at the time they announced the start of their Fall football season:

Eventually all Big Ten sports will require testing protocols before they can resume competition. Updates regarding fall sports other than football, as well as winter sports that begin in the fall including men’s and women’s basketball, men’s ice hockey, men’s and women’s swimming and diving, and wrestling, will be announced shortly.
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The date of that statement: September 16, 2020. Nothing since.

 

For those interested, I just have posted this at my RPI and Bracketology for D1 Women’s Soccer blog: NCAA Tournament: What the Spring 2021 Bracket Might Look Like. It includes a suggestion on how potential at large seletion bubble teams perhaps should think about opponents to schedule for the Spring.

 

I just have posted one more blog article: NCAA Tournament: Team Profiles and At Large Selections. This post reviews data that show how vitally important the combined factor of team RPI Ranks and Top 50 Results Ranks is, in relation to teams getting at large positions in the NCAA Tournament bracket.

I particularly recommend this article for coaches doing non-conference scheduling with a view towards getting a Tournament at large selection.

 

I was surprised, myself, that the Big 12 did not show as having at least 1 expected at large bid. A shorter time span would have them showing better -- but I never select a method based on the results I think it should produce. I always select what I think is a legitimate method and let the results fall where they will -- and let readers know what the method is, so they can evaluate it themselves.

Your comment, however, prompted me to work on a couple of other, more refined, methods for what a realistic bracket might look like in terms of numbers of teams from the different conferences. When I am done, I will add those results to the article you are referring to (and will announce here that I have made the addition). I think those methods will show the Big 12 as likely doing a little better than the first method indicates, but they still may be lagging behind the other Power 5 conferences overall in terms of what a reasonable bracket should look like.

 

As promised, I have updated my blog article on what the Spring 2021 NCAA Tournament bracket might look like, from a conference participation perspective. I think it is much improved: NCAA Tournament: What the Spring 2021 Bracket Might Look Like

 

The NCAA has issued its 2021 NCAA Division I Women’s Soccer Championship Preliminary-Round Information and Bid Checklist. Here is what I have gleaned from it:

The preliminary rounds will be at predetermined sites.

Those wishing to host preliminary rounds must submit their bids between January 28 and February 17. The NCAA will announce the selected sites the week of March 18.

The NCAA will announce the tournament bracket on Sunday, April 18. (This means any conferences scheduling their tournament championship games on April 18 will need to move them up to April 17.) If sites have been selected to host, they will be expected to host even if not in the tournament bracket.

Hosts of preliminary round games will be expected to host more than one pair of teams.

The preliminary round games can be in any of three windows: April 25-27, April 26-28, or April 27-29 (i.e., Sunday-Tuesday, Monday-Wednesday, or Tuesday-Thursday).

"Should you ... desire to host multiple pods at your site (e.g., two pods of six teams), also indicate that ...."

I take this to mean that 16 seeded teams will have byes. Thus there will be 16 first round games (32 teams). A site could host one pod of 6 teams -- an eighth of the bracket, which would consist of 2 seeds and 4 other teams; or it could host two pods of 6 teams -- a quarter of the bracket, which would consist of 4 seeds and 8 other teams.

Although it appears that a school will have to be a site sponsor, I do not believe that the site must be at the school. For example, I believe Wake-Med could be a site (even though it already is the College Cup site).

 

A main pre-occupation for me this year is whether the Women’s Soccer Committee will be able to use the RPI as a tool in forming the NCAA Tournament bracket this Spring.

I just have posted two blog articles on this subject. The first shows two tests I have created for seeing whether the RPI will be usable: NCAA Tournament: Keeping the RPI Honest - Part 1. The second shows the end-of-season RPI rankings my pre-season simulation process generates for teams and applies the two tests to those rankings: NCAA Tournament: Keeping the RPI Honest - Part 2.

You can check these articles out and make your own tentative judgment whether the RPI will be usable this year.

 

According to the NCAA Pre-Championship Manual, they are to issue RPI rankings this week, which ordinarily would mean today or tomorrow. I am doubtful that will happen -- 75 teams have not even played games yet. Of course, they could simply ignore those teams and issue RPI ranks for all the others. If they do, the rankings are going to be interesting, unlike anything we have seen before.

 

It is up to the two schools to decide whether a game is an exhibition (scrimmage) or a counting game. Any game (conference or non-conference) can be an exhibition.

This year is a bit of an oddity, partly because some conferences have decided that for counting games, they can play only conference games. Thus if a team is to play other games, they must be exhibitions. For some games this year, one team schedule says the game is an exhibition and the other does not. I do not know if both consider it an exhibition or this is a misunderstanding between them. In addition, some games that both teams list as exhibitions are in the NCAA statistics data base as counting games (maybe the schools eventually will realize this and remove them). I do not know why this has happened, but wonder if it has something to do with the crowding of Fall sports into the Spring season creating overloads on the school staff responsible for tracking everything and reporting it into the NCAA stats system. The NCAA is dependent on schools doing this correctly.

The reason I care about this is that it affects the RPI and will affect the NCAA Tournament bracket formation process. If what really were exhibition games are in the official NCAA data base, they will be treated as counting games for RPI and bracket formation purposes and that would be a problem. (I do my little bit to try to help these problems get fixed.)

 

Will the RPI be usable for this season? That is a major question the Women’s Soccer Committee has to deal with. This week, I have posted the first of a series of weekly reports on this: NCAA Tournament: Keeping the RPI Honest, Part 3. It follows up on two articles I linked in post #61 above. It shows how current RPI ranks compare to historic baselines for what they should look like from a conference and region perspective. As an additional bonus, at the end of the report I show the RPI Top 60 through Sunday’s games.

If you are interested in the RPI’s viability this year, you might want to check out this new article and then follow my weekly reports as they come out. I will post a notice and link here each week, once I have posted my weekly report.

My approach simply is to provide underlying data related to the question whether the RPI will be usable and then leave it to you to decide whether it will.

 

I am not doing my regular updated ranking reports this year, due to the issues the RPI has with the constrained schedules.

If you want to find team RPIs and ranks, however, you can go to the Soccer Schedules by AllWhiteKit website, maintained by Chris Henderson. The link will take you to their Adjusted RPI page. If you click on the Adjusted RPI column heading twice, it will put the teams in RPI rank order. Further, if you look to the left, you will see a column headed ID with a little icon that is a padlock. If you click on the icon, it will lock the column, which will be the team RPI ranks. Then, if you click on the Team Name heading, it will put the teams in alphabetical order. You then will be able to look for any team you are interested in and see its rank in the ID column and its rating in the Adjusted RPI column.

These ratings are updated in real time as the games are entered into the schedule. It is the best day by day source for team ratings and ranks and is very dependable.

And yes, Western Michigan currently is at the top of the RPI ranks.