From what the experts are saying the Boise State men's basketball team should receive their first ever at large berth into the 2013 NCAA tournament. In stories I have read the term that keeps coming up over and over again is RPI.
When it comes to basketball I know the difference between a 2-3 zone and man-to man defense. I can spot a pick and roll. And, I know what it means when a team is on the tournament bubble. But when it comes down to it, I have never looked into what RPI actually means. Obviously I knew it was a system of ranking teams, but how does it work? Is it the BCS rankings for basketball?
So I turned to the one place I knew I could find an answer, the all-knowing Google. The first thing that came up in my RPI search was the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a Division III school located in Troy, New York. They sponsor 23 sports and are nicknamed the "Engineers." Notable alumni of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute include the inventor of e-mail and the architect of the original Yankee Stadium and Fenway Park. But they didn't invent the RPI formula so my search continued.
The RPI Wikipedia page listed a number of entries including the Republican Party of Iowa, the Retail Price Index and the Ratings Percentage Index. That was it! The Ratings Percentage index. I hit the mother lode.
Under the basketball heading it explained that the ratings are a mathematical formula based on a team's winning percentage, opponents winning percentage and opponents' opponents' winning percentage. That was all I needed to know. It is like the BCS formula except human polls have no input. I didn't graduate from M.I.T., so I will leave it to smarter people to figure out. Conferences even have their own RPI. Unlike football, the Mountain West is one of the strongest basketball conferences this year while the SEC is 8th.
Despite all the RPI talk, certain teams will get an automatic berth into the NCAA tournament and others will rely on a selection committee. Some non-deserving teams will get in while others will be left out. To me it sounds a lot like the BCS sytem with a lot more teams.
