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Message: [QUOTE="fieldystick, post: 5024138, member: 8152"] Thank you for your kind words as always about my work. I put a lot of effort into what I do, and I hope that some others find it useful for getting a grasp for where we are/where we might be heading. - So this is my position on this: the stated selection criteria are well known by many who follow the sport religiously. I'll post them below for my reply to the next part of your post/question and also for those who don't know them. The selection criteria themselves are largely objective. The data that "we" (the committee/those of us who make mock brackets: Stevens/Foy/Jastrzembski/myself) use to apply those selection criteria is objective. My personal application/weighting of those selection criteria to the data presented to me is (somewhat) [I]subjective[/I]. I try to be as consistent, fair, and unbiased as I can be when I am making a bracket projection, but obviously I am human and I have biases/personal interests/etc. Basically, what I am saying here is that I realize there is some degree of subjectivity to what I am doing already. That degree - which I hope is small - is all that I am willing to allow into my published work. Do I have opinions about which teams are good? Of course. Do I have an opinion about where things might be heading? Certainly. I'll throw out a little bit of that here, even: I think it's more likely than not that the current ACC top 4 (i.e., not UNC) will claim 4 of the top 6 seeds come May. But I do not claim to be a lacrosse savant when it comes to Xs and Os. I will readily admit that many of you on this forum know more about those aspects of the sport than I do. I have only been following lacrosse for 15 years now, which I know pales to how long many here have followed, and I have never played the sport (I never had the opportunity to - it was non-existent in my part of the world when I was younger). I would feel uncomfortable projecting even more of my subjectivity - even so far as picking the "favorites" to win their games - into my bracket. I feel more comfortable analyzing the data that is already in front of us; that's what I think I'm pretty good at. If someone takes my analysis as being grounded in some reality and therefore valuable, I think they can project their own opinions/projections of future games onto it from there. So here are the selection critiera for those who do not know them by heart: [ATTACH alt="Screen Shot 2024-03-25 at 4.38.08 PM.jpg"]239126[/ATTACH] I have had a long running discussion with the resident Virginia fan on this forum ( *wave* [USER=7179]wgdsr[/USER] ) regarding the role of "own" RPI in selection over the last few years. If anyone is really particularly interested in this, you can look back at bracketology threads from 22 and 23 and find some of our discussion. So - my stance on this remains: selection of at larges and seeding is somewhat correlated and maybe you could argue it is highly correlated with own RPI, but I do not subscribe to that it is 1-to-1. It is my belief that the selection/seeding process is hollistic. Maybe the selection committee leans a little more on own RPI than I personally would like. Example: I am 100% sure that Duke was the #1 seed last season becuase of they were #1 in RPI. I believed and still believe that Virginia should have been the #1 overall seed last season, but the selection comittee shrugged and said we don't know what do with these three (Duke, UVA, UND). Re: Yale as your example of a disconnect - don't worry about that; it will correct itself. The RPI is still relatively immature. Yale is #1 in RPI right now largely because they have played 6 games all against teams in the top 20 of RPI. As of today, the second part of their RPI - opponent record, which counts 50% - is .784 (78.4%) which is an [I]insane[/I] number. To give some reference, these are the 5 highest part 2 of RPIs currently: Yale .784 Hopkins .722 Loyola .682 Cornell .663 Duke .660 10th is Maryland at .635 20th is Virginia at .537 Yale is a massive outlier in this metric right now. Yale should make the NCAA tournament this season if they perform as expected the rest of the way, but they likely will not be a super high seed unless they win out from here on. Specifically regarding the ACC: the 4 highly regarded teams are all about to play each other (other than: Duke/SU which already happened) and in some cases more than once (ACCT). The ACC's collective RPI will rise relative to those of other conferences as conference play is going on. ^ And finally... on that point: I strongly suspect that it is in Syracuse's/the collective ACC's long-term interests this season that the committee does indeed operate as they typically have / in a way that is heavily based on the RPI. ;) (Even though it may not seem that way based on what the RPI currently says.) [/QUOTE]

Verification: What is a Syracuse fan's favorite color?