I like realtimerpi better than ESPN.
I used to read Palm (now at cbssports.com) when he ran his own RPI site. Assuming that he puts in as much work now as he did then, I trust his numbers. For an example, he talked about asking the NCAA questions when his numbers differed with their’s and making adjustments when necessary…and on occasion the NCAA adjusted theirs. I say all of that to say that CBS seems to agree with realtimerpi pretty closely which gives me confidence in both of their numbers.
I use espn because they give me the RPI summary table for the entire conference. I used to create that table by copying the values from CBS which took a lot of time. I plan on using the numbers from CBS when I attempt a more detailed discussion on the ACC bubble teams….not so much for the RPI ranking of the team in question, but rather for the ranking of their wins.
If life will get off of me a little, I hope to do an entry on the new quadrant layout from the NCAA. If anyone hasn’t heard about it, Top 25, Top 50, Top 100 wins, etc are being replaced by quadrants. The standard for a given quadrant win is less for neutral and away games, thus giving more value to road/neutral wins.
Quadrant 1: Home 1-30; Neutral 1-50; Away 1-75
Quadrant 2: Home 31-75; Neutral 51-100; Away 76-135
Quadrant 3: Home 76-160; Neutral 101-200; Away 136-240
Quadrant 4: Home 161-plus; Neutral 201-plus; Away 241-plus.
As far as I can tell, anyone writing articles about the NCAA is going to use the quadrants for the selection process is just guessing. One of the things to look for this year is a selection that you wouldn’t have made under the old system.
The professors behind The Dance Card haven’t written anything so far this year. I’m interested to see what they are going to do with what is claimed to be a new selection process.
