Even though the NCAA Selection Committee says that the RPI is just one of many many tools used to seed teams — and thus the predictive system for the NCAA Championship Tournament results — the RPI is the MAIN seeding criterion. Period.

The NCAA has its own reasons for continuing to use a ratings system that does not account for home/away/neutral matches OR sets won/lost OR margin of victory. One of those stated reasons, however, should not and cannot be its predicted accuracy.

The net is overloaded with abstracts on the topic of RPIs — no doubt a lot of students have gotten their Masters writing their thesis on the controversial subject. For students who are thinking of doing a final exam paper on the subject, the following link is a good place to start (involves soccer but same smell):

https://sites.google.com/site/rpifordivisioniwomenssoccer/rpi-strength-of-schedule-problem

‘Nuff said.

since then, other metrics have emerged that from a statistics standpoint is proven to be a better measure of the “strength” of a team (for lack of a better term). but the NCAA has no incentive to use a metric that is not their own. unfortunately, it’s to the detriment of the sport.

one question then: who came up with the formula?

I am not the only one who perceives a bias towards Power 5 conferences. have had discussions with many coaches and others involved in the sport who worked to get the coaches poll as now part of the formula.
You saw the BCS mentality creep in over a decade ago. Otherwise you wouldn’t have had the designation among committee members as “mid-major” representative. And you wouldn’t have seen the SEC suddenly be considered
a power volleyball conference. The Pac-8/10/12 has always been good. My issue is with a 10th place team that barely got to .500 and is 8-12 in conference with a ‘really bad’ loss to a Cal getting in.

for instance, if riverside was 10-0 before conference play, and ended up with a 10-20 record at the end of the regular season … that is better than riverside starting out 0-10 against their non-conference opponents, and finishing with a 0-30 record by the end. (riverside’s actual line wasn’t that far off this season. they were 2-10 against their non-conference opponents, and finished the season winless in league play with a 2-26 overall record. and since hawaii played riverside twice, this got factored into hawaii’s RPI formula twice! brutal!)

take also the example i discussed above about the pac-12. even the bottom dwellers in the pac-12 (like cal and washington st) had great win/loss records before conference play started. cal and washington st were 8-2 and 9-3 respectively, against mostly weak teams, before pac-12 play began. they ended up being at the bottom of the pac-12 standings, but since they had accumulated some wins early on, it lessened the blow of their conference opponents having to play them, some twice in a season.

at the very least though, i hope i can add to the discussion on here about it. i don’t like the RPI. i’ve been very outspoken against it, like many fans and posters on here and on VT. but at the same time, i hope we don’t continue to perpetuate the myths surrounding it.

I agree that ideally you want Big West opponents to schedule tough and win, but teams like Riverside are too weak to garner such wins. I’m only suggesting a near term approach, not a long-term solution for improving UH’s RPI. Better teams won’t do as I hope because they have an incentive to improve RPIs as much as possible, and for them, beating cupcakes is less valuable than beating great teams.

And I agree NCAA won’t listen to complaints, but focusing on a flawed calculation is even less productive.

With the conference teams having good recruiting results since Hawaii rejoined the conference, the conference would be better served by having teams schedule a bit tougher. But, they need to win these games.

I think Hawaii, LBS, Northridge, Cal Poly and UCSB can do this, and perhaps Irvine & UC Davis.