If XU and Cincinnati are both fighting for the same bubble spot, XU gets in and UC doesn't.
It's simple...Bobo is on the selection committee. Yes, he does have to recuse himself but don't think for a minute that the other committee members don't know what school he works for.
Cats need to take care of business down the stretch so they are safely in the tournament and no favoritism leaves them on the outside looking in.

(02-17-2012 11:13 AM)bearcatmark Wrote:  We have not done a good job in the non-conference RPI strength of schedule front. That is our own fault.

We get it. But let's examine why we scheduled such a poor OOC schedule. Could it be that little thing called money.

Let's look at the business side and the free market of basketball scheduling. Mid-major teams that are around the Top 100 demand two to three times more money to come play at 5/3rd then a Chicago State. They know that everyone is trying to improve their RPI, but don't want to play those games on the road. So a team like Akron or Cleveland State know that they are the in the drivers seat when negotiating price. Chicago State costs maybe $50,000 to come to Cincy, where Akron would want upwards of $120,000. UC simply does not have the funds to fill an OOC schedule with $100,000+ teams. So you have a choice - play away games at places like Georgia because of home-and-home contracts or play teams in the bottom 200+. Which is worse, home wins against the bottom 200+ or a couple of losses on the road to teams like Arkansas-Little Rock (Huggs loved that one).

Sure everyone would prefer to play Top 100 teams at home, but UC can simply not afford it. So your blame should be directed at the current AD at the University of Illinois. He was the man in charge of fund-raising, and his poor effort created these kind of schedules. Considering our lack of money, I think Mick did a good job of getting the Georgia series, the Wright State series, and getting Marshall to come to town.

Another idea that you may like would be to add an additional tax to all UC students, including those that know nothing about sports, to help fund improved basketball scheduling. Just kidding my friend.

(02-17-2012 11:59 AM)Ragpicker Wrote:  

(02-17-2012 11:13 AM)bearcatmark Wrote:  We have not done a good job in the non-conference RPI strength of schedule front. That is our own fault.

We get it. But let's examine why we scheduled such a poor OOC schedule. Could it be that little thing called money.

Let's look at the business side and the free market of basketball scheduling. Mid-major teams that are around the Top 100 demand two to three times more money to come play at 5/3rd then a Chicago State. They know that everyone is trying to improve their RPI, but don't want to play those games on the road. So a team like Akron or Cleveland State know that they are the in the drivers seat when negotiating price. Chicago State costs maybe $50,000 to come to Cincy, where Akron would want upwards of $120,000. UC simply does not have the funds to fill an OOC schedule with $100,000+ teams. So you have a choice - play away games at places like Georgia because of home-and-home contracts or play teams in the bottom 200+. Which is worse, home wins against the bottom 200+ or a couple of losses on the road to teams like Arkansas-Little Rock (Huggs loved that one).

Sure everyone would prefer to play Top 100 teams at home, but UC can simply not afford it. So your blame should be directed at the current AD at the University of Illinois. He was the man in charge of fund-raising, and his poor effort created these kind of schedules. Considering our lack of money, I think Mick did a good job of getting the Georgia series, the Wright State series, and getting Marshall to come to town.

Another idea that you may like would be to add an additional tax to all UC students, including those that know nothing about sports, to help fund improved basketball scheduling. Just kidding my friend.

The blame shoud always be on the AD and on school like Miami, Oklahoma, Wright State, Xavier, Marshall and Northwestern State losing way more games than I thought they would back in November.

UC might have a bad non-conference SOS but there are so many other schools with red flags this year. Some haven't won away from home, others have awful records against the top 100.

I didn't realize that Mike Thomas received a significant bonus for keeping the athletic department under budget, which resulted in almost no money for buy games. It sounds like that is going to change under Whit, which is good to hear.

Quote:NCAA's RPI line as tired as ever

February, 16, 2012
5:59 PM ET

By Eamonn Brennan

This week, the always-excellent Scott Van Pelt unleashed a rather cathartic rant about the essential uselessness of the Ratings Percentage Index, or RPI. The points Van Pelt made are the ones that must always be made about the RPI:

1. The RPI is older than the compact disc, and roughly as technologically advanced.

2. The RPI's methodology (who you beat plus who your opponents beat plus who your opponents' opponents beat) is really dumb. There are countless rankings systems that provide a much more realistic methodology, including the numbers generated and maintained by Ken Pomeroy and Jeff Sagarin, Ken Massey, the big brains that built the LRMC and, most recently, the ESPN Analytics Group's new Basketball Power Index, which is, after a mere week of existence, already five or six times better at evaluating bubble teams than is the RPI.

3. As much as the NCAA downplays the role of RPI in the committee's selection and seeding process, Scott says it can't help but be "subliminally impacted" by the metric, and he's exactly right: Every "nitty gritty" page the NCAA uses, every fact and figure and list of top 50 wins and strength of schedule and noncon SOS and you name it is broken down based on RPI. You can't sit in the selection room and not be affected by RPI. It underpins every consideration the committee makes, whether the committee always knows it or not.

4. Everyone knows this.

Van Pelt ended with a call to media action: "It's on us to be smarter in how we position it. It's on us not to throw up the resumes side-by-side with, 'here's their wins against the top 50.' It's their wins against the top 50 based on the RPI!"

This is the only part with which I disagree. When we do Bubble Watch every week, for example, or when the TV folks throw up said resumes side by side, we're all doing so because we're trying to figure out how the selection committee will decide. The committee plays by stupid, outdated rules, and if we're going to predict what the committee is going to do, we have to be stupid and outdated, too. The Watch has made this clear before.

This week, the NCAA convened its two-day mock selection committee, a chance for media members to learn more about the process, ask questions of the NCAA brass, and experience the unique form of blinding boredom that comes from debating whether or not Colorado State deserves another look. (It's also a chance for media members to live-tweet the proceedings, and thus inflict said blinding boredom on each of their poor, unsuspecting followers.) Each year, the NCAA gets questions from the assorted media. Each year, at least one of these questions concerns the RPI. And each year, the NCAA gives some form of the answer Rivals.com's Jeff Rabjohns tweeted Thursday: "RPI is a historical measurement of factual results of a season, is not predictive, therein lies the value." The NCAA's line is as such: The RPI isn't the only thing we use. It's just a tool. But we think it's a valuable, fact-based tool, and we're going to keep using it. The end.

This is incredibly frustrating! It's frustrating not only because the NCAA's "Process Principles for Selection, Seeding and Bracketing" do not explicitly require the committee to use the RPI. It's also frustrating because most of the metrics discussed above do much the same. The only difference? They do it better.

One day, in a brave new world, the NCAA will do what it should have done years ago. It will chuck the RPI. It will find a far more advanced, reality-based data point (I'm a company man, so I'll propose BPI, but KenPom would do just fine, too) to use as its preferred computer metric. Or maybe not. The point is, until the NCAA decides to join the rest of us in the 21st century, where we all point and laugh at the RPI (and anyone who thinks it's the best numerical metric by which to evaluate a basketball team), we're stuck. In the selection committee's world, it's 1980 forever.

The good news? If you never got to catch the Talking Heads in concert, you're in luck. The bad news? The best sporting event on Earth is being selected and seeded by luddites. Bummer, huh?

Update: Twitter follower Matt Frese makes an excellent point, and one I forgot to address in this post, here: They're never going to chuck RPI for KenPom or Sagarin or BPI because those metrics use Margin of Victory. ... Sure, these other models are more predictive, and just better. But the NCAA is never going to reward blowouts (end rant)."

Matt's right: The NCAA doesn't want to reward blowouts, nor should it. Why encourage teams to run up the score? In the immortal words of Rick James, I think I have the remedy: The BPI accounts for this in its new formula by providing diminishing returns for blowouts: "By capturing blowouts, but not overweighting them, BPI credits the ability of good teams to easily beat poor teams without providing incentive to win by 30 when 20 is a safe margin. By capturing both blowouts and close games in this way, BPI summarizes a team's résumé for the NCAA tournament well." See? Problem solved.

http://espn.go.com/blog/collegebasketbal...ed-as-ever

We played four teams in the 300+ range. Had those games been replaced by the 101-199 crowd we'd likely be safe as an 8-9 seed right now.

Alabama St.
Radford
AR Pine Bluff
Chicago St.

UCSB
South Carolina-Upstart
LA Lafayette
Austin Peay

That right there is the difference between a terrible OOC schedule and an acceptable one. The fact that the difference carries just as much weight with the selection committee as a win at Georgetown is ridiculous. Criteria for an at-large bid should come solely from who did you beat, where did you beat them, and who did you lose to. If the committee still wants to emphasize scheduling by dropping a team a seed line or two after the fact then I can live with that. You should be rewarded for quality wins, not scheduling.

I don't think XU will remain in the discussion. I see them losing at least another 2 games. They got a tough one tomorrow against Dayton and they have to play St. Louis as well as a Charlotte team who took them to the wire. Don't remember the rest of the games, but they've got a shaky mental state, as the staff canceled practice this week.

(02-17-2012 02:30 PM)Bearcat04 Wrote:  We played four teams in the 300+ range. Had those games been replaced by the 101-199 crowd we'd likely be safe as an 8-9 seed right now.

Alabama St.
Radford
AR Pine Bluff
Chicago St.

UCSB
South Carolina-Upstart
LA Lafayette
Austin Peay

That right there is the difference between a terrible OOC schedule and an acceptable one. The fact that the difference carries just as much weight with the selection committee as a win at Georgetown is ridiculous. Criteria for an at-large bid should come solely from who did you beat, where did you beat them, and who did you lose to. If the committee still wants to emphasize scheduling by dropping a team a seed line or two after the fact then I can live with that. You should be rewarded for quality wins, not scheduling.

If we only had an extra $400,000 lying around to schedule those teams. Of course those four teams you listed could have had injuries during the season and ended up being 200+ teams.

(02-17-2012 03:15 PM)Ragpicker Wrote:  

(02-17-2012 02:30 PM)Bearcat04 Wrote:  We played four teams in the 300+ range. Had those games been replaced by the 101-199 crowd we'd likely be safe as an 8-9 seed right now.

Alabama St.
Radford
AR Pine Bluff
Chicago St.

UCSB
South Carolina-Upstart
LA Lafayette
Austin Peay

That right there is the difference between a terrible OOC schedule and an acceptable one. The fact that the difference carries just as much weight with the selection committee as a win at Georgetown is ridiculous. Criteria for an at-large bid should come solely from who did you beat, where did you beat them, and who did you lose to. If the committee still wants to emphasize scheduling by dropping a team a seed line or two after the fact then I can live with that. You should be rewarded for quality wins, not scheduling.

If we only had an extra $400,000 lying around to schedule those teams. Of course those four teams you listed could have had injuries during the season and ended up being 200+ teams.

I'm saying you shouldn't have to schedule those games, but unfortunately you have to because the committee and the RPI make a mountain out of a molehill in terms of the difference between those 8 teams.

Also goes to show that simply scheduling better RPI teams isn't going to make a huge impact in attendance, if at all. I'd imagine we'd hear the same complaints that we don't play anyone good if we played TX Arlington, Robert Morris, N.C. Asheville, Lamar, or Fairfield. All five of these teams currently sit between 110-118 in the RPI.

Again the RPI or BPI or Kenpom, whatever ranking you prefer, should treat all teams over 150 or so as the same in the calculation. For the purpose that the RPI is used for, it would result in a much more accurate portrayal of a team.

But as has been said I'm guessing several thousand times on this board, if the Cats win they are in. Take care of business, do NOT leave it up the committee.

(02-17-2012 05:25 PM)BeerCat Wrote:  Again the RPI or BPI or Kenpom, whatever ranking you prefer, should treat all teams over 150 or so as the same in the calculation. For the purpose that the RPI is used for, it would result in a much more accurate portrayal of a team.

But as has been said I'm guessing several thousand times on this board, if the Cats win they are in. Take care of business, do NOT leave it up the committee.

I disagree. There is a difference between team 180 and team 350 and it should be measured as such. The RPI just does a terrible job at measuring that difference. The whole method of the RPI is ridiculous.

Other metrics do a significantly better job at ranking each teams, which makes it easier to evaluate each teams performance.

Also, in order to have a legitimate system, you have to take into account margin of victory. Without it, you may have a system that is politically correct. But it will also be deeply flawed.

I think we will see a day when the RPI is just one of the computer tools on sheet used by the commitee. The old RPI was stick a heck of lot better than the new one.

Now if we can figure out a way to get college football to move to 32 team playoff.....