Pairwise Comparisons and PWR for D1 College Lacrosse (2002)

This page represents the application of the NCAA Division I Men's Ice Hockey selection procedure to Division I Men's Lacrosse. It is not an attempt to model the lacrosse selection procedure, which is described in the NCAA Men's Lacrosse Championships Handbook.

The PWR page of slack.net/hockey contains links to more information about the PWR as applied to hockey.

Current Pairwise Comparisons (including games of 2002 May 4)

Explanation of the Table

The table above lists all of the tournament-eligible Division 1 teams with overall winning percentages of .500 or above, plus Hobart, who received an automatic bid to the NCAA tournament. These are referred to as TUCs, or "Teams Under Consideration". Each team has been compared to each other team on the basis of the selection criteria the NCAA uses for Division I Men's Ice Hockey. Those criteria are:

RPI

The Ratings Percentage Index (with the hockey weightings), described in detail on our RPI page.

TUC

Record vs other TUCs. Head-to-head games are explicitly excluded from this criterion, which is judged on straight Winning Percentage (with ties as always counting as half a win and half a loss) in the relevant games.

L8

Record in the Last 8 games. (This is modified from the hockey criterion of last 16 games, since the lacrosse season is shorter.) Note that head-to-head games are not excluded from the Winning Percentage used to evaluate this criterion.

COp

Record vs Common Opponents. Again, this is resolved on the basis of Winning Percentage.

H2H

Head-to-head results. Each win in head-to-head competition carries the same weight as each of the other criteria.

A team gets one point towards the comparison for each of the first four hockey criteria it wins, plus one point for each head-to-head victory. Whichever team has more points according to this method wins the criterion. In case of a tie, the team with the higher RPI wins the criterion.

In each team's row, in the "Comparisons Won" part of the grid, are listed the abbreviations of all the teams with which they win comparisons. Each of these cells is a link to a mini-table (which will appear in a pop-up window under most browser setups) detailing the results of the five hockey criteria. The RPI row of the mini-table contains the overall record and RPI for each team, the TUC, L16, and COp rows contain the record and winning percentage in the games relevant to each criterion, and the H2H row contains the head-to-head record of each team against the other.

The PWR column in the main table gives the total number of comparisons won by each team. The teams are ordered according the their PWR; if two or more teams are tied in the PWR, the tie is broken if possible according to the number of comparisons each wins against the other tied teams; if this fails to resolve the tie (which can be thought of a ro-sham-bo situation: Rock crushes Scissors, Scissors cut Paper, Paper covers Rock), the RPI is used to break the tie.

Breakdown of Criteria

The following table lists, for each Team Under Consideration, the three hockey selection criteria which are more or less the same in each comparison: RPI, record vs TUCs, and record in the last 8 games. Each team's name in the table is a link to a rundown of the games contributing to these three criteria.

Note a team's record in the "vs TUCs" column is that against all TUCs; since head-to-head games are left out of this criterion, the record used in an actual comparison will be different if the two teams have played each other.