Thursday, October 21, 2004
It took two weeks, but
Joe Lunardi finally commented on the NCAA's decision to weigh road games more than home games in an "adjusted RPI."Immediately after Seth Davis went public with the tournament committee's intent to incorporate the home-road factor into the RPI, I called on bloggers and statisticians to crack the code and learn the exact formula the NCAA will employ on Selection Sunday.
In his latest column, ESPN's "Bracketologist" gives it a go.
How would this translate numerically into an RPI rating? Since we know that home teams win roughly two-thirds of the time in Division I, a road victory should be worth about twice as much as winning at home (because, by the numbers, it is twice as hard to achieve).
I'm guessing the new NCAA formula won't go that far (essentially saying that road wins are worth 1.50 victories and home wins are only 0.75), as this would be too dramatic a departure from the "known" without sufficient study of the unknown effects. But we can at least split the difference and reprogram Factor I (winning percentage) to, say, 1.2 "equivalent victories" for road wins and 0.8 equivalent victories for those at home. Similarly, road losses would count as only 0.8 while losing at home would count 1.2.
Sounds sensible enough. Though the devil is in the details. As Seth Davis had noted, both the home-road neutral RPI and the "adjusted RPI" will be made available to the tournament committee. The importance they assign of each -- along with the weights assigned to home and road games in the "adjusted RPI” -- will go a long way in determining which schools go dancing and which schools stay home.
