Division 1 Ratings, Bracketology, Scheduling, Etc.

Discussion in 'Women's College' started by cpthomas, Sep 10, 2019.

  1. cpthomas

    cpthomas BigSoccer Supporter

    Portland Thorns
    United States
    Jan 10, 2008
    Portland, Oregon
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
  2. cpthomas

    cpthomas BigSoccer Supporter

    Portland Thorns
    United States
    Jan 10, 2008
    Portland, Oregon
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    I've posted a further article, on the Committee's #3 seed decisions. It focuses on the question of the Committee's decision to give Wisconsin the fourth #3 seed, rather than Duke, Washington, or Texas Tech. It poses the question whether Wisconsin got a #3 seed because the Committee felt the Big Ten should get at least 1 of the top 12 seeds. If you're interested, go here: The #3 Seeds, including: Duke, Washington, Texas Tech, or Wisconsin?
     
  3. cpthomas

    cpthomas BigSoccer Supporter

    Portland Thorns
    United States
    Jan 10, 2008
    Portland, Oregon
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    And, I've now posted my last article on seeds, addressing the #4 seeds. It suggests the Committee might have been engaging in "conference balancing" among the top conferences in deciding which teams would get those seeds. If you're interested, go here: The #4 Seeds: Who to Pick from a Mess of Teams?

    One more article to go, on the at large selections.
     
    McSkillz repped this.
  4. cpthomas

    cpthomas BigSoccer Supporter

    Portland Thorns
    United States
    Jan 10, 2008
    Portland, Oregon
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    I've now posted my article on the at large selections for the NCAA Tournament. It suggests that Conference Ranks and teams' Conference Standings might have played a significant role in the Committee's decisions on the last teams to get selections. If you're interested, go here: The At Large Selections: Who Gets the Last Two Slots?

    As a general comment, I think the Committee did a good job this year. All of its decisions seem reasonable. That doesn't mean they're all the decisions I would have made, but I can find a good rationale for all of them.
     
  5. Lovethegsme

    Lovethegsme New Member

    Nov 8, 2018
    its awesome the work that cpthomas and others put in...i wish you were on the ncaa committee...i am still shocked Rutgers got a seed especially with the injuries they had and the same with UVa. Neither team was close to being 100% healthy and neither should of been seeded how they were...
     
  6. cpthomas

    cpthomas BigSoccer Supporter

    Portland Thorns
    United States
    Jan 10, 2008
    Portland, Oregon
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    If this were basketball, that certainly would be the case.

    Soccer definitely is different for at large selections (as are other non-revenue sports). There, the Committee has certain factors on which it must base its decision. The factors are subject to interpretation, but all of them have to do with how a team has performed over the course of the season. There's only one factor that conceivably could relate directly to injuries, and that is the factor of results over the last eight games (which includes wins/losses/ties and strength of opponents). If applied to Rutgers and Virginia, that factor would not have made much difference since they both performed well right up until the last game of the season. For at large selections, the "how did you perform" factors are the only factors the Committee is allowed to consider.

    For the 16 seeds, the Committee is not limited to these factors and is not even required to consider them although it appears they do. Thus the Committee could consider late season injuries. In the cases of Virginia and Rutgers, however, the Committee could not have had much information on how the injuries affected them, at least not as to Virginia -- I don't know when the injuries you are referring to that happened to Rutgers occurred. So, the Committee, if it were to consider injuries, would have been in the almost impossible position of having to guess how much the injuries would affect the teams with very little evidence to go on. And frankly, from following the process closely over the years, I don't think the Committee considers injuries, absences for National Team duties, or anything like that. From what I've observed, it seeds team based on who they played and the results, looked at in a bunch of different ways.

    One way to look at it is, for non-revenue sports, the question the sport committees are looking at is, "How has the team performed over the course of the season -- who has earned the right to play in the Tournament and get seeds?" It's a backwards looking approach. For basketball, although there's that question, another major question appears to be "How will the team perform in the Tournament?" It's a predictive approach.

    The NCAA could change the rules to allow the Committee to add a predictive approach to its decision-making. To do this properly, however, would mean NCAA staff gathering a great amount of information and providing it to the Committee members in a timely fashion, and the Committee members spending a great deal of time digesting the information, so that the quality of the information and the Committee's digestion of it is equal and fair for all teams in the mix. I know that the NCAA staff already does a nearly overwhelming amount of work (they've told me so), so this probably would mean the NCAA's having to hire significant additional staff -- especially since the same approach probably would have to apply to all non-revenue sports. Additional staff would mean additional NCAA costs, and they seem to be very cost conscious when it comes to non-revenue sports.

    As full disclosure, I prefer the approach that says teams should get at large selections and seeds based strictly on how they have performed over the course of the season. But, it's true that a result of that will be that teams occasionally get at large selections and seeds that they can't live up to because of events that have occurred at the end of the season or they get put in positions that they surpass because of events that occurred during the season that aren't affecting them at the end (I'm thinking of National Team absences). That's a result that's ok to me. On the other hand, I can understand why others would prefer a predictive aspect to the decision-making that could take into consideration late-season and early or mid-season events.
     
  7. Sam Miami

    Sam Miami Member

    Bayern Munich
    Germany
    Sep 11, 2019
    Very insightful - on the men's side there is a clear east-west bias in selection. Is this true on the women's side?
     
  8. cpthomas

    cpthomas BigSoccer Supporter

    Portland Thorns
    United States
    Jan 10, 2008
    Portland, Oregon
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    Not exactly.

    There is a problem that the RPI has, which is this: For geographic and regional distribution of teams reasons, teams tend to play in pools.

    You can think of it this way: Team A plays Team B. Team B plays Team C. Team C plays Team D. Assume they're all from different conferences. Team A's winning percentage (RPI Element 1) is determined by its result with Team B. Team A's opponents' winning percentage (RPI Element 2) is determined by Team B's result with Team C. And Team A's opponents' opponents' winning percentage is determined by Team C's result with Team D. If you're Team A, ideally from an RPI perspective the order of strength of teams is Team A, Team B, Team C, Team D. That way, the winning percentages of Teams A, B, and C all will be good and Team A will end up with a good RPI rating.

    Looking at it from a conference perspective, some teams play in pools that go four conferences (A, B, C, D) deep with significant differences as they step down. Some play in pools where it's hard to go four conferences deep or where the differences aren't as significant as they step down. The result of this is that the RPI tends to rate teams from the former pools more highly than teams from the latter pools. For DI women's soccer, it turns out that it's the west RPI pool that gets most underrated, with the mid-west pool coming next. The southeast pool gets somewhat overrated and so does the northeast pool.

    Since the primary reasons for this are geography and the unequal numbers of teams in the different RPI playing pools, I'd expect that the same thing would be true for the men as for the women.

    One of the things I don't know is how aware the Women's Soccer Committee is of this phenomenon.

    I'll be writing a detailed article about this in a bit, with a lot more detail and data.
     

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