Polls for Mar 9: Media #8 / Coaches #7

[ColdAnger]

Agree that RPI is a very poor choice for men’s lacrosse. RPI breaks down in small schedules because it’s a very blunt, variance‑prone metric built on win percentages and opponent chains that simply don’t stabilize over 15-18 games, especially when conferences don’t broadly interact.

RPI is just a weighted average of three things: your winning percentage, your opponents’ winning percentage, and your opponents’ opponents’ winning percentage.

And as DomeHolmes commented, RPI ignores margin, game control, home/road, injuries, and form; a one‑goal 4OT win counts the same as a blowout, and an early‑season result counts the same as a late‑season one. In a short season that magnifies randomness already, throwing away that contextual information makes the ranking even less representative of who’s actually best.

All that said, it is what the NCAA committee uses so the schools have to play the game. It will be interesting to see how RPI differs for Cuse’s gauntlet vs Duke’s cakewalk.

 

[Cuse All-In]

Agree that RPI is a very poor choice for men’s lacrosse. RPI breaks down in small schedules because it’s a very blunt, variance‑prone metric built on win percentages and opponent chains that simply don’t stabilize over 15-18 games, especially when conferences don’t broadly interact.

RPI is just a weighted average of three things: your winning percentage, your opponents’ winning percentage, and your opponents’ opponents’ winning percentage.

And as DomeHolmes commented, RPI ignores margin, game control, home/road, injuries, and form; a one‑goal 4OT win counts the same as a blowout, and an early‑season result counts the same as a late‑season one. In a short season that magnifies randomness already, throwing away that contextual information makes the ranking even less representative of who’s actually best.

All that said, it is what the NCAA committee uses so the schools have to play the game. It will be interesting to see how RPI differs for Cuse’s gauntlet vs Duke’s cakewalk.

I agree!!

While nothing is perfect, I think investment banking analysts should be hired to come up with a better model - I can say from experience that they would definitely improve the product.

 

[DoctahLexus]

Agree that RPI is a very poor choice for men’s lacrosse. RPI breaks down in small schedules because it’s a very blunt, variance‑prone metric built on win percentages and opponent chains that simply don’t stabilize over 15-18 games, especially when conferences don’t broadly interact.

RPI is just a weighted average of three things: your winning percentage, your opponents’ winning percentage, and your opponents’ opponents’ winning percentage.

And as DomeHolmes commented, RPI ignores margin, game control, home/road, injuries, and form; a one‑goal 4OT win counts the same as a blowout, and an early‑season result counts the same as a late‑season one. In a short season that magnifies randomness already, throwing away that contextual information makes the ranking even less representative of who’s actually best.

All that said, it is what the NCAA committee uses so the schools have to play the game. It will be interesting to see how RPI differs for Cuse’s gauntlet vs Duke’s cakewalk.

Overall I think at least ignoring margin, injuries, and the time in the season that the game happens are good things about the current system. Those metrics do not necessarily reveal more about a team either IMO, and coming up with a system that fairly factors in those aspects is more difficult than it may seem. Home vs. road should be considered on some level, but factoring in margin can lead to things like teams adding scrubs they can blow out to their schedules or pouring on goals in garbage time like we see in basketball, and injuries/early season vs late season games are factors that every team has to deal with on some level. There is no perfect system, but the current one is not as broken as some alternatives would be IMO.

RPI looks more absurd this time of year since there are so many games left to play, but by years end it does a decent job.