Some postseason thoughts from D1Baseball

[Alum-Ni]

Etheridge: Holding our breath with the RPI • D1Baseball

Another swing of the hammer and we have another bracket. Do we have the best tool to build the field of 64? Mark weighs in along with other reactions from selection day

d1baseball.com

Spoiler: Article

Holding our breath with the RPI
by Mark Etheridge, D1Baseball.com

When I was a boy, I worked with a man who had an old hammer. Most of the time, it worked fine. Then occasionally, the hammer's head would slip away on the backswing, and there'd be a projectile hurling airborne.

He would collect the tool, patch up any damage it caused, and repair the hammer. That hammer did its job, most of the time, anyway. But you never really knew when it wouldn’t. We all knew the hammer was faulty, but because of habit, thrift, or stubbornness, the man still used it along with his other tools.

The RPI is like that old hammer. For many situations, it works fine. Then there's that swing that gets away from you.

It's time for a new hammer.

Despite all the cries, this isn't a black-and-white issue. In some situations, the RPI works fine. The problems are at the cutlines, the last host or two, and the last few spots in the field. That's where the focus is, and that's when we lose our head.

Indiana State received a host with a number nine RPI. Congrats to the Sycamores on a great season at 42-15, especially after starting 2-8. But they went just 3-9 versus the teams in the field of 64. Indiana State was rewarded by a system that rewards games against teams with high winning percentages.

There were some swings that the hammer got right. The seed lines looked really solid. No mystery two-seeds that should have been a three or vice-versa. The host teams were all defensible picks, and the top eight was as well. In most cases, the RPI identified the best teams.

However, no conference benefited more from the RPI than the SEC.

Make no mistake; the SEC is the best baseball conference by any measure. There are better players, coaches, facilities and and large, supportive fanbases. The teams also win a lot of games, which the RPI formula embraces and the committee rewards.

Rewarding excellence isn't a problem. Sports are a meritocracy, after all. However, when SEC teams can stockpile top 50 wins, a key committee metric to see how teams will fair against regional caliber teams, it inflates the resume.

Instead of an arbitrary number like 50, why not measure it against the teams in evaluation for the field? that would include bubble teams like Arizona State (52), USC (53) and Kansas State (55) and exclude teams with no chance for inclusion, like Georgia (42), Louisville (43) and Missouri (50).

"I think there needs to be some groupthink, and some statistical experts to come in and help us kind of recreate this thing," said committee chair John Cohen. "Basketball has done a great job of changing their RPI to the NET and moving it in a different direction."

Cohen, the former head coach at Kentucky and Mississippi State, is now the Athletic Director at Auburn. He understands how the RPI works and how coaches are scheduling to build a strong RPI.

In the past, there was a stigma attached to scheduling to "game" the RPI. Now, if you don't schedule with the RPI in mind, you are at a disadvantage. Some teams who openly scheduled to influence the RPI, like Kentucky and Indiana State, were rewarded with host sites. This incentivizes a scheduling philosophy not to play the best teams but to play the best teams that will boost the metrics. Sometimes, the two are aligned. Not always.

 

[Alum-Ni]

(rest of article below....)

Spoiler: Rest of Article Continued

The RPI was instituted to capture results against unbalanced schedules. It can give insight into schedule strength and how teams did against varying levels of schedule strength. It was designed to apply after the fact. It wasn't designed to be a scheduling model, yet that's what it is becoming as savvy coaches have figured it out.

They are smart to do so. As a 16-14 SEC team, Kentucky would have been a 2-seed with its traditional schedule. This season, the Wildcats played four mid-major powers (think high winning percentages) in the first four weeks, with two of them on the road. SEC teams typically play three of the four pre-conference weekends at home. The alteration worked to boost the Wildcats to a #2 RPI in a regional host with a national 12-seed.

This is the new way to schedule. Use what the RPI values to elevate your schedule up front, as opposed to having the RPI evaluate your schedule after the fact.

But that's just one of the RPI attributes that have people buzzing. Cohen listed his two primary concerns with the current RPI.

"We need to create a system that disincentivizes canceling games for RPI reasons," Cohen said. "The other thing is while there is some credit for traveling (RPI road wins count as 1.3 wins and road losses count as 0.7 of a loss) but there needs to be more. If a team travels 300-400 miles away, they have to make a commitment financially. I would love to see more weight put on that. If you do that, I think you will see power fives travel more to try to get that credit. It will help mid-majors too. Everyone that does it gets that credit."

But those are ways to change moving forward. We can't change the goalposts mid-drive, and as a result, the RPI played an oversized role in this season's field of 64. Every team with an RPI under 42 (Georgia) got in.

And with seven of the top 11 RPIs and two more in the top 20, this was an SEC-dominated field.

The SEC received ten bids, which tied its own record set in three other seasons (2014, 2018, 2019) and once done by the ACC (2016). This season was a bit of an anomaly since there were no SEC bubble teams. Four SEC teams received top-eight seeds, matching its own record done four times previously, most recently in 2021.

Getting half of the host sites was the biggest coup. No league had more than seven previously. Many had wondered if the committee would dare go as high as eight from a single conference, despite there being no actual limit.

"The committee recognized that the SEC won 81% of their non-conference games," Cohen explained. "There was no discussion about needing a set number of teams from the SEC, 'there's too many, or there's not enough.' We did not do that with any leagues in the country. Nobody is keeping a running total because if you do that, you are not picking the best teams. Every team brings their own resume, and it doesn't matter what league they are in. It does affect their competition, though, because that league might have more top 50, top 100 opportunities.

"Obviously, when you step back and see eight from the SEC, that's a big number."

South Carolina getting a host spot surprised some since the Gamecocks finished the season on a 4-11 skid.

“At one point, they were 30-4,” Cohen said. “We judged on overall body of work. They swept Florida. They took two out of three from Clemson. You can’t have a discussion about who will go deep in this field without discussing Clemson and Florida. They won five of those six games and have an 8 RPI.”

The ACC was next, with eight teams in the field and three hosts. NC State was snubbed a season ago but got in as a bubble team. Notre Dame did not.

The Big 12 received six bids, with Oklahoma getting the nod over a Kansas State club that finished ahead in the standings and swept them in the weekend series. Oklahoma State was the only Big 12 host.

The Sun Belt, now the fifth-rated RPI conference, received four bids, with Louisiana-Lafayette getting one of the final spots. The Ragin Cajuns, at RPI 47, have the worst RPI of any at-large team. Coastal Carolina earned a host, and Cohen stated Southern Mississippi narrowly missed receiving a host site.

Another interesting note was the Missouri Valley getting only one bid after being a multi-bid conference in nine of the prior 12 seasons. That one bid went to Indiana State, which received a host spot.

The Pac-12 received five bids, with Arizona getting in while USC and Arizona State were left out. USC (RPI 53) was 17-13 in Pac-12 play, and Arizona State (RPI 52) was 16-13. Both were bypassed by Arizona, who went 12-18 but went 3-1 in the conference tournament and had a better RPI at 45. The 12-18 mark was the worst regular season conference mark for an at-large team since Oklahoma State went 9-16 in 2009, ninth out of ten Big 12 teams that year, and got in with a 26 RPI.

Since the committee views aggregate conference records, meaning all games versus league members including tournaments in the conference mark, a midweek non-Pac 12 game versus Arizona State helped Arizona (UA won 20-0), as did beating Arizona State 12-3 in the opener during the run to the tournament final.

“Arizona had 16 wins against Pac-12 competition when you include the tournament and the extra game they played against Arizona State,” explained Cohen. “Those last two games they played against Arizona State, that’s not the entire decision, but it’s a piece of it, were really impressive. It was 32-3. They take two out of three from USC. The RAC (Regional Advisory Committee) from the PAC said this is a team you do not want to play and ranked Arizona higher than their standing in the league. Their SOS was solid at 30. The way they were playing at the end of the year, we just felt they were deserving.

Meanwhile, the Big West was a one-bid league, with UC-Irvine and UC-Santa Barbara left out.

UC-Irvine at 49 was a notable snub, largely due to only one top-50 RPI game. However, Irvine had games versus both Arizona State and USC fall out of the arbitrary top 50 as those teams' RPI dipped. If the metric were top 60 instead of top 50, the Anteaters would be 7-4. As it were, thy were 0-1.

"If you are in an RPI-challenged league, you have to figure out how to get some top 50 opponents in those early weekends," Cohen said.

And you must keep them from dropping from 49 to 51, or they don't count in that valuable metric.

That’s why using an arbitrary number like 50 might be easy, but it’s not as accurate as evaluating your record against teams that are in postseason contention. Compiling who is in contention has an arbitrary nature as well, as a cutoff has to be determined, but I prefer that precision to relying on the randomness of 25/50/100.

There is no shortage of envisioned improvements like this one, but changes are slow to take hold.

“It’s easy to have an idea,” said Cohen. “It is really difficult to make that idea come to fruition. It takes some great mathematical minds to make this work. I think it’s worth getting these minds together to see what can be done.”

There are other tools available that will be evaluated. The current tool could also be adjusted. To hit where you aim, you need the right tool.

Like with the old man’s hammer, we hold our breath each time, hoping we’ll get the results we want. You tell me, are we getting the results we want?

 

[Alum-Ni]

Fitt: Committee constructed a solid field of 64, but it's time to stop dragging feet on RPI reform • D1Baseball

The Division I baseball committee did plenty right with the 2023 field of 64, but RPI reform remains essential, and the time to act is now.

d1baseball.com

Spoiler: Article

Committee constructed a solid field of 64, but it's time to stop dragging feet on RPI reform
by Aaron Fitt, D1Baseball.com

Serving on the NCAA tournament selection committee will always be a largely thankless job, by its nature. No matter what choices the committee makes, some teams will always feel jilted, whether because they were snubbed for at-large bids or overlooked for regional host spots or top-eight national seeds, or because they don’t like their draw. As a committee member, people on Twitter are going to call you biased, or an idiot, or both. It comes with the job.

So let’s start this analysis with some positives from the 2023 NCAA tournament field, because there were plenty of them. By and large, this committee did a solid job constructing the field, although we have our share of gripes, as we always will — it’s the nature of the beast.

Some takeaways:

- The biggest compliment I can pay this committee is that every team in the field was seeded appropriately within its regional, leading to 16 regionals that have good competitive balance. In that respect, this is the best field of 64 that I can remember. We had just one team slotted as a 2-seed that would up as a No. 3 -- North Carolina, which will face Iowa in the Terre Haute Regional. The Hawkeyes were the strongest No. 3 seed in our projection, and they landed as a No. 2 seed. Those two teams were clearly neck-and-neck in the committee's eyes as well, so it makes sense that they are paired together as the top No. 3 and the bottom No. 2.

- Out of the 16 teams we projected as regional hosts Sunday morning, 15 of them were named hosts by the committee. We were surprised South Carolina earned one of those host spots, and we believe the Gamecocks were less deserving than Campbell, Southern Miss and Boston College, so it was surprising to see the committee opt for a record eighth host out of the SEC when it had several other very worthy hosts to choose from — and committee chairman John Cohen (Auburn’s athletics director) made a point to comment on how strong the hosting cases were for Campbell, USM and BC. But when push came to shove, the committee opted for an eighth SEC team that finished 4-11 down the stretch — and seeded the Gamecocks higher than Alabama.

- That was another eyebrow-raiser: Alabama drew the No. 16 seed despite a No. 11 RPI, an 18-16 aggregate SEC record, and a 17-14 mark against the Top 50. It's hard to defend Alabama (our projected No. 11 seed) ranking behind the Gamecocks and Auburn, which finished with a No. 19 RPI, an 18-15 aggregate SEC record, a 15-16 Top 50 record, and notably just a 13 record against the Crimson Tide.

Auburn’s No. 13 seed is particularly strange considering how hard the committee leaned on RPI in its bubble selections and on some of its host selections (giving top-10 RPI teams Indiana State and South Carolina host spots thanks to top-10 RPIs, despite other significant flaws in their resumés). But when it came to Auburn, the committee put RPI aside and took the No. 19 team in those rankings, and seeded it above an Alabama team that had better or equal metrics across the board. We don’t object to Auburn being a host — winning 18 SEC games is almost always host-worthy. But the pecking order was strange, and the optics of it are not great considering Cohen’s day job.

- The committee got the right eight teams for the top eight national seeds. I was pleased to see that Stanford was not punished for for a No. 15 RPI and an 0-0 record against the top 25 in the RPI. The Cardinal is clearly the class of the West, and winning the Pac-12 by five games should carry a lot of weight. Apparently that accomplishment carried just enough weight with the committee to keep the Cardinal inside the top eight, by a whisker over surging Miami.

- The committee included two bubble teams that were not part of our final projected field last night: Arizona and Louisiana. Both both of those teams were among our “first four out,” so neither inclusion feels crazy, and indeed we all argued last night that we thought the Cajuns should be in the field, but two of our three projectors didn’t think the committee would include them. So it was good to see a 40-win Louisiana team that went an aggregate 22-14 in the No. 5 RPI conference get rewarded with an at-large bid, despite a borderline No. 47 RPI.

- My biggest gripe, though, was Arizona getting in over Southern California and UC Irvine. The Wildcats sure looked like a regional team this week in their run to the Pac-12 title game, and that performance surely made an impression on the committee. Arizona played its way from well off the bubble to right on the bubble over the last three weeks, going 2-2 against Stanford, winning a series from USC, taking a midweek road game from Irvine, and beating Arizona State. That strong late performance certainly earned the Wildcats strong at-large consideration, but we don’t believe it should have been enough to offset a 12-18 showing in regular season (making Arizona the team with the worst conference record to get an at-large bid since 2009). The Wildcats lost six of their 10 conference series and were swept four times.

By contrast, USC won seven of its 10 Pac-12 series and finished 17-13 in the regular season (18-14 aggregate when including the conference tournament). USC’s resumé had warts too — most notably a 5-15-1 record against the top 50, so if the committee had chosen a different team like UC Irvine over the Trojans, I think it would have been very defensible. I just don’t think Arizona’s late surge should have been enough to rank the Wildcats over the Trojans, based on the totality of their bodies of work. Ultimately, it feels like the committee just leaned on RPI here: Arizona is No. 45, and USC is No. 53. And that’s that.

- Irvine, meanwhile, finished No. 49 in the RPI, went 19-11 in the Big West, and posted a sparkling 19-6 road record. The Anteaters went a combined 7-1 against Arizona State, USC and UC Santa Barbara, all teams that were in the top 50 late in the year, but fell just outside the top 50 at the very end. In the process, they dragged UCI’s top 50 record down to just 0-1. In this case, record vs. the top 50 felt like an inaccurate representation of Irvine’s quality of work; if you moved that arbitrary cutline to, say record against the top 56, Irvine’s case would have looked a lot better. This is why I prefer to use one of Mark Etheridge’s favorite tools: record against the field (including all the legitimate bubble teams in this pool). Cohen said the committee looks at record against the field, but surely it did not include the fringe bubble teams in that discussion. Cohen also acknowledged that Irvine made a good attempt to schedule well, noting that playing Tulane for a three-game series is usually a quality nonconference matchup, but this year Tulane struggled historically to 19-40 (despite getting hot last week and snagging an automatic bid). Those games hurt the Anteaters in the RPI, and Cohen made it sound like the committee considered that, but it wasn’t enough to get Irvine over the hump.

 

[Alum-Ni]

(rest of the second article)

Spoiler: Rest of Article

In years past, West bubble teams have gotten more RPI leeway than teams in the Southeast, because (as Cohen himself acknowledged), geography works against those West teams when it comes to building a strong RPI. I would have liked to see No. 49 Irvine and No. 53 get a little more of that leeway this year, as I think both teams were more deserving of bids than No. 45 Arizona and No. 40 Oklahoma, which struggled in their conferences. For that matter, Mark, Kendall and I agree that Kansas State had a better case than Oklahoma, but the Wildcats were No. 55 in the RPI, 15 spots behind the Sooners, and that proved to be a decisive factor, as we suspected it would.

Again, none of these choices were egregious — we just disagreed with them.

- When Cohen became chairman last summer, he said he wanted to try to reform the process, to come up with some better way of evaluating teams than the RPI, whose flaws he has repeatedly acknowledged. It has become commonplace for teams to cancel bad RPI games late in the season to improve their postseason chances, and that’s because the RPI can punish teams even if they win games against low-ranked opponents. That’s a problem that Cohen wants to fix, and he said there has been plenty of talk about how to fix it. But there has been no action, and Cohen’s time as chairman will end in August with the same old system still in place, unless the committee gets serious about enacting reform, and not just talking about it.

“There’s two things I have a real concern about right now, one of them is cancelling ballgames. And I understand why coaches are doing it, I’m not calling anybody out. I just think we need to create a system that disincentives cancelling games,” Cohen said. “The other thing is I just think there is some credit for traveling, I think there needs to be more credit for traveling. If a team travels 300, 400 miles away, and they have to make a commitment financially and all the things that travel does to you, I would love to see a little more weight put on that. And if you do that, I think you’re going to have more power fives travel more to try to get that credit, and the Midwesterns, Northeasterns, even some folks out West, they’re going to get more credit as well. It’s easy to have an idea. It’s really difficult to make that idea come to fruition, because it takes great mathematical minds to make this work. I don’t know if it’s possible, I just think it’s worth entertaining, it’s worth getting this group together and seeing what can be done. Because that team, and I’m gonna use Boston College as an example, that Boston College who has to go south early in the year and play, I think some real credit has to be given to those schools who can go and win games when they have to travel great distances, especially when they don’t have the opportunity to get outside early in the year.”

He’s right about one thing: some great mathematical minds will be needed to come up with a better system, whether it’s changing the RPI or replacing it altogether. But this is baseball, and great mathematical minds abound in this sport.

So let’s stop throwing our hands up and gnashing our teeth. We need a committee chairman to make a stand and bring together a group of these great mathematical minds to come up with proposals for actual solutions. Cohen is right when he says it would not be fair to move the goalposts immediately, when coaches have already built their schedules to maximize the RPI. But we can still institute changes that go into effect in 2025 or 2026, giving coaches plenty of time to adjust.

So what are we waiting for?

 

[AuroraHawk]

They can start by not weighing mid-week games the same as weekend games. Any suggestion that teams that will remain nameless . . . ahem, Grand Canyon . . . ahem, Dallas Baptist . . . which are undoubtedly good teams but artificially enhance their RPIs by scheduling mid-week games against tough competition. I'm not arguing that DBU should be "punished" for playing Texas A&M, Texas or Texas Tech on a Tuesday or Wednesday but there is no freaking way in hell that DBU should receive the same "credit" for beating one of those teams 4th or 5th pitchers as a team that plays those teams over the weekend and faces the best pitchers in those teams' rotations.

 

[AuroraHawk]

Memo
To: Coach Rick Heller
From: Aurorahawk
Re: 2024 Scheduling and beyond
Date: May 30, 2023

Coach Heller -
I found this quote in an article from D1 Baseball to be notable.

"Since the committee views aggregate conference records, meaning all games versus league members including tournaments in the conference mark, a midweek non-Pac 12 game versus Arizona State helped Arizona (UA won 20-0), as did beating Arizona State 12-3 in the opener during the run to the tournament final."

If aggregate conference record is considered by the committee and Arizona is going to benefit from a mid-week win against Arizona State (akin to Michigan and MSU scheduling a mid-season game), Iowa should give significant consideration to scheduling home and home mid-week games against Minnesota, Nebraska, Illinois or Northwestern.

 

[GolfHacker1]

Memo
To: Coach Rick Heller
From: Aurorahawk
Re: 2024 Scheduling and beyond
Date: May 30, 2023

Coach Heller -
I found this quote in an article from D1 Baseball to be notable.

"Since the committee views aggregate conference records, meaning all games versus league members including tournaments in the conference mark, a midweek non-Pac 12 game versus Arizona State helped Arizona (UA won 20-0), as did beating Arizona State 12-3 in the opener during the run to the tournament final."

If aggregate conference record is considered by the committee and Arizona is going to benefit from a mid-week win against Arizona State (akin to Michigan and MSU scheduling a mid-season game), Iowa should give significant consideration to scheduling home and home mid-week games against Minnesota, Nebraska, Illinois or Northwestern.

If you get this to him, he’ll consider it. I can’t tell if you actually got this to him or if this is in jest.

Are you going?

 

[AuroraHawk]

If you get this to him, he’ll consider it. I can’t tell if you actually got this to him or if this is in jest.

Are you going?

Not going.

As for the substance of the memo, I'm dead serious. For example, with Illinois not on this year's schedule, I would have rather seen a home-and-home with Illinois than home-and-home with Bradley or UIC (even though they cancelled the home game).

And, in all candor, I had the pleasure of speaking with him last year about a buddy's son who had entered the transfer portal. He was incredibly generous with his time and we talked at length about lots of topics, including RPI manipulation and scheduling. I offered that very suggestion when we talked. The problem with scheduling is . . . and always will be . . . it takes two to tango. Coach Heller is absolutely willing to schedule games against higher end Midwest teams but those teams aren't so willing to schedule Iowa (particularly if it involves traveling to Iowa City).

 

[ICWestfan]

Memo
To: Coach Rick Heller
From: Aurorahawk
Re: 2024 Scheduling and beyond
Date: May 30, 2023

Coach Heller -
I found this quote in an article from D1 Baseball to be notable.

"Since the committee views aggregate conference records, meaning all games versus league members including tournaments in the conference mark, a midweek non-Pac 12 game versus Arizona State helped Arizona (UA won 20-0), as did beating Arizona State 12-3 in the opener during the run to the tournament final."

If aggregate conference record is considered by the committee and Arizona is going to benefit from a mid-week win against Arizona State (akin to Michigan and MSU scheduling a mid-season game), Iowa should give significant consideration to scheduling home and home mid-week games against Minnesota, Nebraska, Illinois or Northwestern.

Memo
To: NCAA
RE: RPI

Dear Committee, a request -

 

[karnack1955]

Not going.

As for the substance of the memo, I'm dead serious. For example, with Illinois not on this year's schedule, I would have rather seen a home-and-home with Illinois than home-and-home with Bradley or UIC (even though they cancelled the home game).

And, in all candor, I had the pleasure of speaking with him last year about a buddy's son who had entered the transfer portal. He was incredibly generous with his time and we talked at length about lots of topics, including RPI manipulation and scheduling. I offered that very suggestion when we talked. The problem with scheduling is . . . and always will be . . . it takes two to tango. Coach Heller is absolutely willing to schedule games against higher end Midwest teams but those teams aren't so willing to schedule Iowa (particularly if it involves traveling to Iowa City).

that reason applies to all Iowa sports, not to many teams want to come play in Carver or Kinnick. so scheduling is difficult to play the better teams.

 

[EvilMonkeyInTheCloset]

Not going.

As for the substance of the memo, I'm dead serious. For example, with Illinois not on this year's schedule, I would have rather seen a home-and-home with Illinois than home-and-home with Bradley or UIC (even though they cancelled the home game).

And, in all candor, I had the pleasure of speaking with him last year about a buddy's son who had entered the transfer portal. He was incredibly generous with his time and we talked at length about lots of topics, including RPI manipulation and scheduling. I offered that very suggestion when we talked. The problem with scheduling is . . . and always will be . . . it takes two to tango. Coach Heller is absolutely willing to schedule games against higher end Midwest teams but those teams aren't so willing to schedule Iowa (particularly if it involves traveling to Iowa City).

So let's go find those teams that refuse to play us and kick their a** and force them to play us (and lose, of course..... )