It'll be interesting to note how the various conferences do in the NCAA. I'd be willing to bet, the ACC is not the 3rd best conference. I give FSU, UNC and UVA excellent chances to make the CC.
The Big 12 and SEC are surely rated highly in RPI because, during the non-conference free-for-all, they took more points from teams. In other words, the teams they played (and, on average, defeated), then rebounded and had above-average years. So their opponents had high(er) W/L, and contributed high Elements 2 and 3 to the Big 12 and SEC. Conversely, we can conclude that the Pac-12's opponents, on average, did less well than that, and so their final W/Ls were lower, and they were worth fewer points. (This was overwhelmingly the case for WSU: we're only #32 because we scheduled teams who were good back when we scheduled them, and then they all kind of slumped together in 2018, so we were only 1 loss of many for them all.) So there's no real mystery in why any conference is rated above another conference. Their opponents did better, measured over the entire year (including their own non-conference and conference play). Now, TV money might, very indirectly, have some effect on this, by making worthy opponents more willing to accept your play date, because they want the TV exposure themselves. That could be an enabler to allow savvy coaches to cherry-pick high(er)-value non-conference match-ups. I seriously doubt that's measurable, though. (In principle, we'd have to compare a conference's average non-conference slate from pre-TV days to current days, and look for good new rivalries.) There's no other effect on TV or money on RPI. Results are insensitive to popularity. ~~~~ I'm sure that if we simply tabulate, for each conference, the sum of its non-conference opponents' final W/L records, they'll be in the same order as the conference RPIs. Suppose each team has 10 non-conference matches; then a conference of ~10 teams will play 100 non-conference matches total, against perhaps 90 distinct opponents. Then the SEC's 90 must have outperformed the Pac-12's 90, in 2018. These things happen. We usually lock in our non-conference home-and-home agreements years (or at least 2 years) in advance, and you never know whether your opponents will all hit peaks or all hit troughs.
Gilmoy's statement, second post above, is right on. The Pac 12 and Big 10 both appear to me to need to invest more in their scheduling. There's a certain amount of guesswork and luck involved, but also a serious commitment to schedule so as to maximize your rating. And, if you're in a conference, it's not sufficient for just you to do it. You need all your conference's teams to do it. You simply can't afford for some of your conference teams to have really poor records. This even is true for the ACC.
I think keen observers have been kind to not have said anything about this already but we definitely lucked out being a #2 seed on the other side of the bracket and I will leave it at that. If we take care of business and get through deep enough and UNC presumably does the same, UCLA are directly running into them in the quarter-finals. UNC are ranked higher than us and have played much better than us this year so theoretically they are the favorites in this scenario, BUTTTTT....nobody should ever count us out, we are playing mimic to how USWNT played in World Cup 2015 in that we started out slow with players missing in October, needed to make adjustments, and now we are on a 9 game winning streak. At this point our strategy is we keep attacking and attacking and attacking until the last whistle and we don't seem to give a crap if we get scored on. If you are up by 2 and think the game is over with us, think again........Either way if by some miracle we make it to the end, we can hypothetically play Stanford again in the 2018 College Cup Championship. But we aren't invincible as many teams have found ways to score goals against us and keep us at bay. Somehow, someway, we squeak through. I'll be sitting in the stands in Westwood, ready for round one.
Wisconsin wasn't great that year. But they were sure as hell better in their conference than Miss. State was this year. I don't care about non-conference schedules in August. I care more about how a team plays in the middle and late in the year, against their conference. That's when a team should be peaking, and show whether they are NCAA tournament material or not.
Arizona, Washington State, Colorado, and Arizona State are some quality teams in the Pac 12. They play better soccer (to the eye) than pretty much all of the SEC. Teams like South Carolina continue to get rugged, play ugly, and find ways to win games 1-0. They win like USA beat Nigeria in the 2015 World Cup, which wasn't very pretty, lol. An SEC vs. Pac 12 challenge would be interesting. SEC would hold their own, because they would get physical against the Pac 12. The SEC is not exactly the Beautiful Game.
I don't care what the RPI says. Here are the best conferences. 1.) ACC (UNC, FSU, Virginia, Duke, Boston College, Clemson, etc.) 2.) Pac 12 (Stanford, UCLA, USC, Washington State, etc.) 3.) SEC (yeah yeah yeah, lots of decent teams. But no National Title contenders) 4.) Big 12 (Texas is overrated, though Grosso is good. WVU, Baylor, & then Meh) 5.) Big Ten (they don't have any major heavyweights this year, which hurts them)
Toughest first round matches? Duke vs. Rutgers Tennessee vs. Louisville That's great that you care about that. Unfortunately the committee has to look at things objectively. The SEC this year was miles better than the Big 10 was that year, which was part of Wisconsin's problem. They didn't schedule enough tough non-conference games to make up for the fact they played in a mediocre conference (and couldn't beat the two top 25 teams that were actually in the conference). The committee is basically "conference blind" when it comes to selection time. They don't care about your conference record. They care about good wins and bad losses. They won't penalize you for playing in a shitty conference and they won't reward you just for playing in a tough conference. You have to get results and stay above .500. So if you're in a shitty conference, you can't rely on just winning the regular season title (which doesn't come with an AQ), you have to schedule some tough games to pick up meaningful wins and avoid bad losses along the way. Wisconsin didn't do that.
Lots of people keep referencing Southern Cal. What is that??? Cal doesn't have a Southern version. LOL! I think y'all mean to say USC or Southern California. I'm surprised more TrojanSC fans aren't up in arms.
This is a discussion about the NCAA tournament so writing USC or SC can be confusing since other universities can also be referred to as USC or SC. As to why someone doesn't write the full Southern California? California is a long state name and I doubt anybody on a message board would be flustered over an abbreviation when someone writes Southern Cal. Here in LA, we say SC or USC verbally or if you want to be funny as haters like to say, University of Spoiled Children.
MISS STATE played the toughest schedule in the country this year according to NCAA Statistics with an opponents' win percentage of .676. The Bulldogs faced a conference slate with an average opponents' RPI of 28.9, the highest in the SEC. State's opponents' strength of schedule rated fifth in the country. Meanwhile, the SEC boasts the highest average RPI of any conference (48.9) along with six teams in the top 25. No bad losses and several top 20 wins
Go watch the game against LSU SEC CHAMPS and MISS STATE. MISS STATE lost bust dominated the game. Trust me they can play. Wisconsin is weak.
There are more than a few SEC teams that play good soccer, and South Carolina is one of them. It's also true that some teams are physical and play more direct and are not so beautiful (see Miss. State and Arkansas). It's a big conference with a lot of teams who play a lot of different styles. It is a very competitive conference with a lot of teams that are athletic and not so easy to beat--upper tier Pac12 and ACC teams would beat them, sure--and they will get some results against pretty good teams. This is actually a down year for the SEC: Florida had a weirdly bad season and is not even in the tourney; texas a&m and south carolina are not as good as in recent years. I'm not sure how Ole Miss got in the tourney--it is not particularly good but the Rebels beat two high RPI teams late in the season (Miss. State (!) and a good Vandy team, which surely boosted its RPI. They are like Va. Tech--got some key wins in what was otherwise a meh season. I think Mississippi plays Clemson in the first round--interesting matchup that I think Clemson should win. I think Colorado was certainly good enough to be in the tourney--and, yea, may be better than several teams who are in the tourney, but that's not the way it works. You need some quality wins--and outside of beating Washington State, another bubble team that I think lost 5 or 6 straight games at one point--the Buffs had none, and then the loss to Utah was a killa. Every year there are several quality teams on the bubble, and a few are going to be hard done. It's the same in every sport, every year.
That Andy Katz interview suggests strongly otherwise. Your comment is probably six years out of date. More video is available now and social media platforms even allow the committee to see goals happen 30 seconds after they hit the net, as opposed to a day, week or two later.
Who is Andy Katz? And, do you have a link to the interview? Or some other info from which I can find a link? Oh, I just googled Andy Katz and see he is a basketball analyst. The process is completely different for basketball than for the so-called non-revenue sports. So what he says about how basketball does it doesn't apply to DI women's soccer.
Here are the rankings of the conferences based on average Adjusted RPI and average Adjusted Non-Conference RPI. Due to differences in the numbers of games teams play within their conferences, the NCAA considers that to some extent the ANCRPI is the better measure of conference strength. For this year, it doesn't matter much as between the two since the rankings are the same for the top 8 conferences. The differences among the top four conferences -- Big 12, SEC, ACC, and Pac 12 -- are pretty small. There's a big drop after them, to the Big 10.
LOLOLOLOLOL. You think the committee is sitting in a Hyatt Conference room just watching clips of goals? Ooooo she dribbled that really well, ooooo nice corner kick. Give me a break. They have a set criteria and are using it for selections, not subjective "style of play" factors.
Also, here are the Adjusted RPI, Adjusted Non-Conference RPI, and Strength of Schedule ranks of the Top 60 teams:
It’s never going to be perfect, but this RPI system need a complete overhaul.. How is that Miss State schedule the hardest in the country? Georgetown with weak strength of schedule is rewarded with 1 seed, but slightly better strength scheduled USC get penalized for losing to Stanford and UCLA and is handed a 4 seed. Louisville 52 RPI and 80 in strength schedule but gets in over Illinois or Pepperdine?
Georgetown's conference is not a murderer's row but it is a respectable league, and the Hoyas played a strong non-conference schedule--beat W.Va, tied Duke and Va. Tech, beat Princeton (in the tourney) and George Mason (good season--just missed the tourney). The RPI--it never lies! (just kidding). They didn't lose a game, so impressive.
I'm a member on another board, and they make it a point to make sure everyone spells it the right way. I was more surprised no one complained on here, though. As a fan of Penn State, I always correct people who refer to us as "Penn" which is the nickname for the Univ. of PA, an Ivy League school.