(06-21-2017 02:03 PM)mrbig Wrote:  I pulled Rice's pseudo-RPI numbers from Boyd's World. They go back to 1997, which is helpful. The graphs are the 3-year and 5-year rolling average of these rankings, which helps smooth 1-year spikes that do not necessarily represent a trend.




1997: 19
1998: 19
1999: 10
2000: 41
2001: 19
2002: 10
2003: 4
2004: 21
2005: 22
2006: 2
2007: 1
2008: 4
2009: 14
2010: 33
2011: 12
2012: 30
2013: 18
2014: 12
2015: 32
2016: 25
2017: 44

To be clear, the points at the beginning and end of each chart do not represent 3-year or 5-year averages, rather they represent 2-year and 4-year averages.

Again, if you're going to say we've had a steady decline from the absolute pinnacle of college baseball, that's fine, but I don't consider Top 25 performances a reflection of decline in a program. The reality is that the drop off in program performance has been over the past 3 years, and that coincides with the scholarship issue becoming a more glaring problem (as other private schools have found workaround scholarships that Rice has failed to provide).