Last Modified: 2012 March 26
Joe Schlobotnik / joe@amurgsval.org
URL for this frameset: http://slack.net/~whelan/tbrw/tbrw.cgi?2004/rpi.shtml
[an error occurred while processing this directive]The definitions above provide all the information needed to calculate the RPI, but to spell out the formula explicitly, if Vij is the number of times team i has beaten team j (with ties as always counting as half a win and half a loss), Nij=Vij+Vji is the number of times they've played, Vi=∑jVij is the total number of wins for team i and Ni=∑jNij is the total number of games they've played, then team i's RPI is given by
0.25*Vi/Ni + 0.50 * ∑j(Nij/Ni)*(Vj-Vji)/(Nj-Nji) + 0.25 * ∑j(Nij/Ni)*[∑k(Njk/Nj)*(Vk-Vkj)/(Nk-Nkj)]
The RPI was developed for general-purpose use within the NCAA over the course of the past couple of decades. The original definition weighted the terms at 25, 50, and 25 percent for Winning Percentage, Opponents' Winning Percentage, and Opponents' Opponents' Winning Percentage, respectively. However, the impact of strength of schedule on the ratings meant it was possible for a team to hurt its RPI by playing a weak opponent, even if they won the game. (Specific examples of this from the 1994-1995 season were Colorado College vs Air Force and Bowling Green vs Ohio State. In the latter case BGSU split two non-conference games with OSU and fell just short of making the NCAAs; if they had won both games, they still would have missed the tournament, but not playing them at all would have improved their RPI enough to get an at-large bid.)
Presumably in response to this, the weighting of the terms in college hockey's RPI was changed to the 35/50/15. However, that was found to give too little weight to strength of schedule (see "Shortcomings of RPI" below), so the weighting has been changed back to the original 25/50/25, effective with the start of the 2003-2004 season.
A more extreme problem with the RPI was brought to light in the 1998-1999 season, when the Metro-Atlantic Athletic Conference (MAAC) began play and six more Division I teams were suddenly eligible for the NCAAs. Because they played most of their games against each other, the winning percentages which contributed to their strength of schedule were on average not much worse that those of the rest of the NCAA, even though those out of conference games that were played indicated that, top-to-bottom, the MAAC was nowhere near as strong as the other conferences. (The revised weighting, with increased improtance given to a team's own winning percentage, only exacerbated the situation.) This led to the fact that in the first two years of competition, MAAC regular season champion Quinnipiac ended up in the top 12 in the nation according to the RPI by compiling a high winning percentage against a mostly MAAC schedule. The NCAA selection committee anticipated this at the beginning of the MAAC's first season, and reserved the right to overrule RPI and the other selection criteria if it judged based on "overall conference strength" that there was a lack of "competitive equity" between conferences.
In response to this, the NCAA has returned to the original weighting of 25/50/25. However, the previous shortcomings of possibly hurting one's RPI by beating a weak team, which prompted the change away from that weighting in the first place, remain.
It was observed at the time that while Quinnipiac, for reasons described above, was rated significantly higher than they should have been by the RPI, several other rating systems ranked them much lower down, where it was felt they deserved to be. Many of the other ranking systems, like CHODR, CCHP, and Massey, take into consideration factors, like margin of victory and/or home ice, which are deliberately ignored by the RPI. The HEAL and RHEAL rating systems, while only considering won-lost-tied outcomes of each game, make distinctions based on which of a team's games it won or lost (so that beating a good team and losing to a bad team will get you more highly ranked than losing to a good team and beating a bad team).
One ranking system which, like the RPI, considers only a team's overall winning percentage and the strengths of the teams they played, is the Bradley-Terry ranking system, which goes under the name of KRACH when applied to college hockey. KRACH has been described as a system which does correctly what RPI is intended to do: provide a rating which evaluates a team's won-lost-tied performance over the entire season, taking into account the strength of their schedule. Much more on this system can be found at our KRACH page.