As an addition on Fairfield, through last Sunday's games, their NCAA RPI rank was #34. Their KPI rank was #45. Their Massey rank was #71. Their Balanced RPI rank was #101. The NCAA RPI and KPi being fairly similar is typical. Massey and the Balanced RPI being fairly similar also is typical. When the Committee wanted to use a backup rating system to the NCAA RPI a couple of years ago, what I've heard suggests the NCAA staff proposed using the KPI as the backup rather than Massey (much less my Balanced RPI).
Is there still some ncaa staff committee that is making the decision to use rpi rather than a more accurate measure of team strength? Or is this just inertia/laziness on the part of coaches? As part of the house settlement-related rule changes the ncaa moved a lot of decision making to the sport level so there doesn’t seem to be much actual bureaucracy in the way of a change if anyone wanted to make one. I don’t see why the p4 conferences don’t just say enough with this nonsense and mandate using Massey or Balanced RPI.
The NCAA staff is very busy, according to them and which I believe, and their highest priority is the revenue sports, especially basketball, which provides a major portion of the NCAA's and the schools' athletic departments' financial support. A good number of sports use the RPI, most likely with a core computer program. So the NCAA staff might look at making a change only for D1 Women's Soccer as being too much work for a single non-revenue (doesn't make money) sport. They also may be hesitant to consider a change to a new rating system across the board, out of fear of encountering resistance from other sports that may be change-resistant, which could be time- and energy-consuming to deal with. I think this is possible even though basketball stopped using the RPI a number of years ago, pretty much for the reasons I think the NCAA should stop using it for D1 women's soccer. In addition, my impression is that the NCAA staff is very territorial and does not like others mucking around with the RPI, except for very minor changes around the perimeter. I also think that the coaches, as a group, have not done much to push for a change, except for a few members of the Women's Soccer Committee. And for the Committee members who have advocated for change, I think they get stonewalled by the staff. I don't think the staff is dishonest about the RPI, but I am sure they know it has problems and I think they also lack transparency when it comes to making information public that would show what it's problems are. Apart from the mis-ratings, the RPI causes a problem with scheduling. Two teams can have the same RPI rank, but be very different in desirability as opponents. For example, Fairfield's RPI rank through last Sunday's games was #34 but its rank as a strength of schedule contributor to their opponents was #5. On the other hand, Northwestern's RPI rank was #31 but its rank as a strength of schedule contributor was #65. So if I played Fairfield the RPI formula credits me with playing the #5 team and if I played better RPI-ranked Northwestern the formula credits me with playing the #65 team. This means that when coaches are scheduling non-conference games, they have to take this kind of disconnect into consideration. (I developed the Balanced RPI specifically to address this problem, so that its ranks of a team and that team's rank as a strength of schedule contributor are essentially the same. For coaches doing non-conference scheduling, with the Balanced RPI, What you see is what you get.)
Under the sports autonomy rule that went into effect in August this seems to be a change that could be made at the D1 woso soccer committee level without any further review by NCAA staff or committee. That committee currently includes reps from Clemson, TCU, Penn State and Georgia (along with non-p4 Akron, Harvard, LA-Lafayette, South Florida, Cal Poly and Harvard). Would be great if they’d take this up some time soon as it consistently leads to unnecessary confusion and controversy when there are clearly better ways to evaluate teams.
Does anyone by chance have a link to the new sports autonomy rule? I would like to read it and see what it allows. If you give me a link, it will let me avoid going into the morass of the NCAA.org website.
Are you trying to accuse the NCAA of not being a tightly run organization? Division I Governance and Member Services - NCAA.org Sport Oversight Committees Legislative Process.pdf Committees I think this may be the information you are looking for.
This is reasonably good summary of how the new governance process with most decision making pushed down to the sport oversight committee level is supposed to work. Can’t find anything describing how it is actually working in practice, let alone anything specific to soccer. https://www.ncaa.org/news/2025/8/5/...increases-student-athlete-representation.aspx
For (1) the actual current NCAA RPI ranks based on games through Sunday, November 2, and more, and (2) projected end-of-season ranks, and more, if teams perform from here on out exactly in accord with their current NCAA RPI ratings, see my 2025 Article 27: RPI Reports After Week 12 Games. In addition, there's another bonus report this week, 2025 Article 28: NCAA Tournament Bracket Projections After Week 12 Games. The bonus report shows my projected NCAA Tournament bracket based on the Women's Soccer Committee's historic patterns and also what the bracket would look like if the Committee were using the Balanced RPI rather than the NCAA RPI. It also shows Chris Henderson's current bracket prediction, so you can compare all three. It includes a summary of the differences between using the NCAA RPI versus the Balanced RPI in terms of actual at large selections -- Kansas State and Georgia "in" and Oklahoma and Saint Louis "out" -- and in terms of teams excluded from the Top 57 candidate group by the NCAA RPI but included as candidates by the Balanced RPI.
Do you think TCU will end up dropping from a #1 seed? Obviously, it depends on other results, but is say Tennessee, Vandy, or Colorado win their tourneys, do you think they would get the top seed based on history. Not sure historically how the committees have viewed conference tournaments.
TCU is just inside the #1 seed candidate group after yesterday's (Monday's) games, with Georgetown just behind it. Colorado, Tennessee, or Vanderbilt all could bump TCU out of a #1 seed. So I'd say that #1 seed position is up in the air. Regarding TCU's associate HC being on the selection committee, I think that will have zero impact on the #1 seed decisions. There are rigid guardrails in the Committee procedures for exactly that situation. One thing I give the Committee credit for is the integrity of the seeding and selection process.
It's about human nature and confrontation, not integrity. AD from UNC heading the basketball committee last year is just one example in many sports. How did those rigid guardrails and zero impact work? The "not in the room when team discussed" take is burying the head in the sand...the person still has to walk back in the room.
I know people think that, but the DI Women's Soccer Committee's decisions year-in-and-year-out are quite consistent in relation to the data the NCAA provides the Committee and the factors the Committee requires the Committee to use. As for basketball, I cannot comment on that and I'm not sure whatever happens there translates to DI women's soccer, although I doubt it since it's a whole different NCAA world over there.
This isn't a financial/tv thing we're comparing where the worlds are different. This is a human thing and that's the same. Committee members of any sport have to face one another and deal with conflict and confrontation. It's just human nature to make decisions to avoid that when possible and I believe it's human nature for a committee member, whose team is on the bubble of some decision, to get the positive outcome from his/her peers. I'll guess we'll disagree on this one and, more so, will never know how the process plays out behind closed doors. Vanderbilt or Colorado doing well in conference tournaments would make it easier, however, Duke doing well would complicate it.
What started out as a curious exercise has now come to fruition. Fairfield dropped their semi tonight. While I totally agree that the committee won’t put them in. We get actual proof of that theory. On that topic, seems like a fair number of upsets in some of these conference tournaments. Be interesting to see if there are any bid stealing upsets. If Rhode Island upsets Dayton in the A10 final, could they be a 3 bid league? Dayton and SLU are sitting on RPI’s of 26 and 27 if I am not mistaken.
With mostly conference tournament championship games left to play, which may change things, I have an observation related to the NCAA Tournament: It looks like the NCAA Women's Soccer Committee will be facing a bunch of team profiles it never has seen before when it comes to at large seeds and selections. I can see this when my system analyzes the teams' profiles. There always are some teams with new profiles each year, but my sense is that there will be far more new profiles this year than in the past. How do I know this? The way my system works, it has a large number of factors it considers, all derived from the factors the NCAA mandates for Committee consideration in doing the at large selections. The system assigns a scoring system for each factor (for some of which the NCAA already has assigned the scoring system, such as for the RPI). It then looks at past Committee decisions. For each factor, it has a "yes" and a "no" score. A "yes" means a team with that score always has gotten a positive decision from the Committee and a "no" means a team with that score always has gotten a negative decision from the Committee. Using the RPI itself as an example, teams with RPI ratings better than 0.6986 always have gotten #1 seeds and teams with ratings poorer than 0.6479 never have gotten #1 seeds. Part of what this means is that if a team meets some "yes" factors and some "no" factors, the team has a profile the Committee never has seen before (actually, hasn't seen since 2007). As of today, for most seed levels and for at large selections, there are teams that meet both "yes" and "no" standards. In other words, there are a whole lot of profiles for seed and at large candidate teams that the Committee has not seen before. I can think of some possible reasons for this and there may be others: 1. There are more ties than usual -- in the West region, nearly a quarter of games are ending in ties. This suggests a higher level of parity than in the past, which would tend to depress teams' scores on some factors. 2. The Committee, in 2024, changed the RPI formula so that in computing a team's winning percentage, a tie counts only as 1/3 of a win rather than the previous 1/2 of a win. (In my opinion, this was a terrible and uninformed decision by the Committee.) With the increased number of ties, this would further tend to depress teams' scores on some factors. 3. This year, there is a reduction in out-of-region play of about 1/3. As a result, the RPI is even more disabled than usual when it comes to trying to rate teams from one region in relation to teams from other regions. In fact, the RPI may have passed a "tipping point" where it no longer is able to work as a unified national rating system. Rather, it may be that it only, at best, is able to rate teams reasonable in relation to each other when the teams are from the same region, with some very odd results for teams that play their non-conference game against in-region teams but play their conference games against out-of-region teams. A big question is going to be whether the Women's Soccer Committee is going to be up to dealing with this "new world."
Just published, the decisions I think the Committee will make if it follows its historic patterns, with serious caveats: 2025 ARTICLE 29: THE NCAA TOURNAMENT BRACKET - IT'S A NEW WORLD FOR THE COMMITTEE. WILL THEY BE UP TO IT? Now I'm off to bed!
As always, great work by cpthomas! I'll go out on a limb and say TCU gets a 1 seed, Georgia gets a good draw and Clemson makes it.
Beyond the difficulty of using RPI "across" regions, it is obviously flawed within a conference. Take the ACC. RPI: 3rd - Stanford 16-1-2 (technically, 17-1-1 with a PK win in the ACC final) RPI: 2nd - Virginia 12-3-4 with two losses to Stanford
Think this could be a year where we see some teams getting murdered in the first round more than usual. Always happens, but think more so this year with more conference tournament upsets that occurred this November and these teams found a way in. Thirteen #1 seeds didn’t even make to the finals so opened up some things for other lower teams. Some teams with losing records that got lucky in their conference tournament and soon off to get slaughtered by a P4.
Committee once again showed the system’s ability to under rate the west and they must have really liked the SEC. Quick Look- Kentucky and Georgia replaced St. Mary’s and Cal in @cpthomas great breakdown. Didn’t look closely at seedings and may have missed something else.
ACC actually gets frequently underrated by RPI too. It’s in CPThomas’ old reports. Virginia is so high because they had that record vs the toughest schedule in the country. But yes, sometimes it doesn’t make sense
I apologize if I missed this, but is a "Top 50 Win" defined as follows? 1) RPI is used to determine relative team placement 2) Teams get a "point" if they beat a team that is in the Top 50 RPI, otherwise they get 0. 3) As the season goes on and teams go in and out of the top 50, the metric is adjusted accordingly to the most updated RPI top 50.
I'm not sure what you are looking at in "Top 50 Win", as my system uses "Top 50 Results Score" and rank. For that, it considers both wins and ties against Top 50 opponents. It uses a scoring system that is very heavily weighted towards wins and ties against very highly rated opponents. The theory behind the metric is that the Committee wants to know at how high a level a team can compete and this metric helps show what that level is. After all the seeding is done, when I apply a metric that combines NCAA RPI Rank and Top 50 Results Rank (using the table below), with each weighted at 50%, that metric alone on average matches all but 2 of the remaining at large selections based on the Committee's decisions since 2007. Chris Henderson has raised a good question about whether this assigns too much value to ties, based on some of the Committee's recent decisions (including not giving Cal an at large position this year). He thus this year did an evaluation involving only wins and also one involving wins and ties, using the "only wins" as the basis for his final prediction. Yes, the metric adjusts to reflect opponents' most recent RPI ranks.