Rec’ing on…The Ranking Project (5) – final

I’m going to do a summation here, and encourage the curious to hop on over to The Ranking Project page where I will list all of the procedures I used in this project on one convenient link.

Let me say at the outset, that no matter how I churn the numbers…Western Kentucky got screwed this year by the NCAA selection committee. OK. Now that that’s off my chest…

While it uses it only as a "guide," there is no secret that the NCAA leans heavily on its vaunted RPI index when making tournament selections. As I’ve mentioned, it’s widely regarded as being a simple formula of 1/4 a team’s win percentage + 1/2 that team’s opponents’ win percentage + 1/4 those teams’ opponents’ win percentage + some tweaking. This provides a strong indication of how strong a team’s schedule was, and how they did. As guides go, it could be worse.

I adopted the tack that it wasn’t simply whether or not a team won that should be factored, but the quality of the wins. Was the game a triple-overtime nail-biter, or a let’s-beat-the-traffic blowout? My thought is that teams that consistently meet or exceed their expected win margins should be ranked better than teams that only just squeak by, even if the win-loss column says the second team has a slightly better record.

So, going through tons of machinations, I came up with a method that factored in not only the win margin, but whether teams hit their expected win margins (you expect a top-10 team to blowout a team ranked 150…question is, did they do it by enough). I then factored in this average with the average of a team’s opponents based on the same rules.

It’s my hope that the resulting list would serve as a good non-partial way of selecting teams for the NCAA (and subsequent) tournaments. If correct, then this list would include teams from marginal conferences that the NCAA doesn’t give careful consideration to, but who are deserving of a slot at the big dance. We simply take politics and other human factors out of the equation.

Of course, once we have this list, there is still more work to do. The selection committee still plays games with seeding. Here’s how I think it should work: from the generated list (including the conference champions, as now) we split the list into tiers. Tier A has the top four teams; Tier B, the next four; Tier C, the next eight; Tier D, the next sixteen; and Tier E, the final thirty-two. Within each tier, we place each team into their brackets based on random selection. E.g. while a Tier A team will face a Tier E team in the first round, the Tier E team could be ranked as highly as 33 or as low as 64. I think this method preserves the feeling that higher-ranked teams should have some earned advantage in a tournament while also taking away the sort of coronation run that current seeding methods give to the top-ranked team. And if a team happens to fall into a bracket where their school is a host? Great. Let it happen. Why must everything always be so PC-neutral all the time? If the Fates say a school gets to play at home, who are we to argue?

Now, after this, we choose WNIT teams. We use the same method, but I’d propose one more restriction: no conference having 3 (or a fourth of their conference members, whichever is greater) or more teams in the NCAA tournament can send a team to the WNIT. Lower-ranked teams in power conferences that don’t make the dance? You’re out of luck.

So…what do the results look like? Compared to the NCAA tournament list, I got 30 out of 32, and 47 out of 64. If you factor in the 12 tourney champs that were ranked lower than 64, that means I filled out 59 teams out of the NCAA’s field of 64. Not too shabby. Still, I’d have been including several schools that didn’t make the NCAA this year [cough]Western Kentucky[cough]. Here’s a sampling based on Tiers:

Tier A (1-seeds)
NCAA                WQ
    North Carolina      North Carolina
    Duke                Duke
    LSU                 Tennessee
    Ohio State          LSU
    
Tier B (2-seeds)
NCAA                WQ
    Tennessee           UConn
    Maryland            Maryland
    UConn               Ohio State
    Oklahoma            Oklahoma
    
Tier C (3- and 4-seeds)
NCAA                WQ
    Rutgers             Baylor
    Baylor              Rutgers
    Georgia             Georgia
    Stanford            Stanford
    Purdue              DePaul
    Arizona State       NC State
    Michigan State      Arizona State
    DePaul              Old Dominion

Note: the NCAA list is only valid in groups of four…the ordering within those quads is anyone’s guess…the WQ list is in the order of my output.

In my list, who gets in that the NCAA didn’t invite? Western Kentucky, Virginia, Indiana St., Xavier, Kansas St. Texas Tech, James Madison, Miami (Fla), Stony Brook, and Eastern Michigan. Who made the dance that just missed out on my list? TCU, Washington, USC, Minnesota, California, Missouri, Liberty, Marist, Stephen F Austin, and Dartmouth. What is telling is that in my list, two ACC teams get added, while three(!) Pac-10 teams drop off (though just barely). I know some will accuse me of ACC-bias…I would too. Honestly, I’m just as surprised as you guys.

So…there you have it. The Ranking Project. I’m not saying it’s the best system out there…I’m sure it’s not…but I hope that it shows that there are better ways than relying on the RPI and the internal politics of the NCAA selection committee. Keep in mind, I designed this only for tournament selections. While there are aspects that could be used for other purposes, it’s not a good predictor of anything until the season has mostly played out.

If any of this makes sense to you, and especially if it seems like a good idea, I encourage you to write to the NCAA, school athletic directors, and coaches to ask the NCAA to consider an automated method that is a little more sophisticated than the RPI. If you think it might help, you can point them to this blog, or to The Ranking Project page where the important parts of the project are listed.

What do you think? Post your comments.