What the NCAA is trying to do is set up an analytical system that basically takes all responsibility off of them to make any decisions.
I don’t think so. The Selection Committee appears to take every opportunity to distance themselves from the calcs that used to rule college football. No one algorithm is ever going to be able to take in every pertinent aspect and the Selection Committee is not going to turn all of that over to any one algorithm. Just one example is losing your leading scorer for several weeks, racking up a bunch of losses, then start winning again when he comes back (sound familiar?). The committee wants the ability to take things like that into consideration.
I briefly mentioned the mock Selection event. The articles from people who have attended over the past years have been unanimously impressed with how much work goes into the selection process. Most of the bitching comes from talking heads who like to hear themselves talk or are just interested in stirring up controversy.
I read a bunch of articles on this whole subject and linked most of them in the write-up. The “coaches” have complained about the RPI and want something different. I suspect that the bitching comes mainly from the mid-major coaches AND that they are bitching about the wrong thing.
The basic inequity between the power conferences and the mid-majors isn’t RPI calcs. It’s the simple fact that teams in the middle of the power conferences are going to have more chances at top-quality wins. For teams that are any good, more chances equals more quality wins and thus more bids.
If you go back and read the comments from the Monmouth coach, it sounds to me like he was trying to schedule teams good enough to get noticed, but bad enough that Monmouth could beat them. That’s a difficult line to straddle. But even if a mid-major is able to read the tea leaves and pick the right opponents, they have to play on the road.
Power conference teams aren’t usually interested in traveling to play mid-majors….because every OOC road game, represents lost revenue. Sometime during the Great Herb Debates, someone from the comments at SFN counted up and pointed out that State usually schedules about 10 OOC games in Raleigh every year. Assuming that the consistency of past schedules shows intent, it’s going to be rare for mid-majors to play many good teams at home.
Maybe the quadrant system will help mid-majors. Maybe they can schedule enough Q2 wins on the road to get an invite. But you need to know how many Q2 wins it takes to balance a Q1 win before you can draw any conclusions about whether this latest change will help the mid-majors or not.
