RPI is gone!

[TonyTheTiger20]

No, not the school...

https://twitter.com/Salzano14/status...49597996621826
https://twitter.com/Salzano14/status...51382891233281

The NCAA approved moving from RPI to NPI in the Pairwise calculation. It's not likely to be a monumental shift in the rankings, but it is a pretty big shift in philosophy to start moving toward something that's more recursive and less arbitrary.

Here's a link to the summer meeting minutes where it's mentioned:

NCAA Percentage Index. The COC approved the sport committee’s request to use the NCAA Percentage Index (NPI) as a replacement for the Rating Percentage Index (RPI) in the selection criteria, effective with the 2023 championship. The sport committee had asked the COC to consider this in 2020 and was advised to use the NPI in conjunction with – instead of a replacement for – the RPI for two years to assess its impact on selections and return with a recommendation to the COC. In that time the sport committee has affirmed its belief that the NPI provides a better calculation that is based on winning percentage and the opponent’s rating itself (rather than the combination of opponents’ winning percentage and opponents’ opponents’ winning percentage) as the measure of schedule strength.

This is not KRACH, but it's a step in the right direction.

EDIT: Separately, though I think we knew this, the NEWHA finally, officially, gets its autobid this year.

 

[robertearle]

Without ever 'doing the math' myself, I always figured/assumed that in-conference 'opponent' and 'opponent-opponent' has to tend towards 0.5 for everyone if you're playing balanced schedule, because every opponent's win is some other opponent's loss. Won't this do likewise, tend towards 0.5 for the 'NPI component' of the NPI (or however they're going to refer to it)?

 

[TonyTheTiger20]

Without ever 'doing the math' myself, I always figured/assumed that in-conference 'opponent' and 'opponent-opponent' has to tend towards 0.5 for everyone if you're playing balanced schedule, because every opponent's win is some other opponent's loss. Won't this do likewise, tend towards 0.5 for the 'NPI component' of the NPI (or however they're going to refer to it)?

There's no "opponent" and "opponent-opponent" factor to the NPI, it's just "opponent's NPI". Since it's a recursive calculation, how good your opponent is is partially determined by how good their opponents were, and how good their opponents were, etc.

So yes, if you had a balanced schedule, everyone's strength of schedule would be the same. But of course, we don't have a balanced schedule.

If you're referring to that article about HEPI I linked to in my tweet, I think the missing bit of information there is that Hockey East used it for that one season specifically because they weren't going to have a balanced schedule that season. That was during the COVID year.

 

[TovarishchLisa]

I suppose the two (NPI being adopted + NEWHA autobid) go hand in hand to avoid the St. Anselm situation from a few years back, when they were top 5 in the PWR but were only playing NEWHA teams

 

[TonyTheTiger20]

I suppose the two (NPI being adopted + NEWHA autobid) go hand in hand to avoid the St. Anselm situation from a few years back, when they were top 5 in the PWR but were only playing NEWHA teams

The NEWHA autobid is more hand in hand with the expansion to 11 teams. NPI and RPI won't be dramatically different. The main thing that will keep a NEWHA team out of the at-large picture is the fact that they all have a handful of games against major conference programs.

If they can win those games, then, well, they deserve to be where they end up lol... but yeah, the conference is not nearly as silo'd away from the rest now and you won't get that "numerical confusion" that came from a lack of non-conference games.