Around D-I tonight

[DeltaOne81]

UND blows a 3-0 lead after 1 to loose 5-3 (w/ ENG) to CC .

Gotta also root for the long shot UAA against Minn, which is probably at about the end of the first, but I can't find details.

[Section A]

1-0 Minnesota in the first - not sure of the time; just saw the post on USCHO

[atb9]

You are doing a lot of wishing if you want UAA to win a game...they are really bad.

[DeltaOne81]

Seeing as Minn just went up 2-0, yeah... but maybe playing them will pull Minn's RPI down anyway :-).

[Greg Berge]

Results since Tuesday, by ranking on Tuesday:

1 Maine
2 NoDak L-CC
3 CC W-NoDak
4 Cornell L-Colgate
5 UNH
6 BC W-UMass
7 Michigan W-Ferris
8 Minny W-UAA
9 Ferris L-Michigan
10 OSU T-NoDame

[DeltaOne81]

If Maine beats UNH tomorrow, we win the TUC category versus UNH and therefore pick up another comparison win. Also, should UND lose again, we'd have a chance of picking up the comparison against them, if their RPI drops enough. If not, we'd tie the comparison (though apparently they're going with the Whelan method of comparison ties now).

By playing UAA tonight, Minn's RPI dropped 0.0044, shifting things around enough to put us in 6th in the PWR, instead of the bottom of a 3-way tie for 5th . Minn still wins the comparison though, with an RPI 0.0014 higher than ours. Their RPI should drop again by playing UAA again, but even a win over Colgate would probably drop ours (though Colgate has a slightly higher RPI than UAA), so it'll be close.

I need to sleep :-).

[jtwcornell91]

DeltaOne81 '03 wrote:

Also, should UND lose again, we'd have a chance of picking up the comparison against them, if their RPI drops enough. If not, we'd tie the comparison (though apparently they're going with the Whelan method of comparison ties now).

I'm not sure what you mean by that.  Individual comparisons are never tied, because RPI is the tie-breaker.  If you mean "breaking ties in the PWR" that's a concept that's only meaningful to those of us who are trying to rank the teams according to total comparison wins.  Right now, the old-style PWR table still breaks PWR ties by RPI, while the comparison grid breaks them by individual comparisons.  But in both cases, the tables indicate that teams are "tied in the PWR" because they win more comparisons.  Remember when you say "they" that USCHO is not the NCAA.

Their RPI should drop again by playing UAA again, but even a win over Colgate would probably drop ours (though Colgate has a slightly higher RPI than UAA), so it'll be close.

Remember, RPI (1 part pct, 2 parts opct, 1 part oopct) is not RPI's measure of strength of schedule.  It's better to use RPIStr (2 parts pct, 1 part opct), although leaving out head-to-head games actually hurts us here, since Colgate's win over us won't count in determining their winning percentage for these purposes.  At any rate, UAA's winning percentage is so bad that their RPIStr is only .3012 compared to Colgate's .4322.  So playing UAA hurts your strength of schedule worse than playing Colgate (or anyone else but Fairfield and Princeton).

[Al DeFlorio]

The most encouraging item in John's posting above is that UAA will likely not join Wisconsin and Michigan Tech as TUCs under the new RPI scheme, which, IMHO, is much too skewed toward whom you've played as opposed to how you've done.

[DeltaOne81]

[Q]I'm not sure what you mean by that.[/Q]
The way I remember it on USCHO in the past (in fact, I distinctly remembet them stating it in one of their 'how the PWR works' pieces, is that if an individual comparison is tied, then it's tied. Nobody gets a point for it and RPI is only used to break overall ties.

While your method breaks individual ties with RPI (as well as overall ones). But now that USCHO has adopted your comparison grid structure, you can't have no one winning a comparison, or there will be no where to put the link to view it. So, taking a look at the BC-UNH comparison shows it tied at 2, yet given to UNH for the higher RPI (which does indeed count in their 24 comparison wins - if I counted their row correctly).

What I was saying about UND, is that they currently beat us 1-0 (on RPI only - other categories tied). If they lose tomorrow, we'll win the TUC category, making it 1-1. Under the "old" USCHO system, we may not have picked up a comparison win, but they would have lost one. Currently, unless they're RPI drops significantly, they'll still get the point.

But definitely route for Maine tonight, it'll give us the TUC category versus UNH, and give us that comparison 2-1. Perhaps our RPI will even advance enough (with respect to UNH's - currently only 0.0014 apart) to give us a 3-0 sweep. Plus a Maine win helps our RPI, albeit barely.

[Q] the new RPI scheme, which, IMHO, is much too skewed toward whom you've played as opposed to how you've done.[/Q]
Agreed, I know it's a MAAC team, but when Quinnipiac has 15 wins, and it's much higher than a team that's 1-17, I have issues with that. I don't care how good the teams you play are, if you only have 1 win in 20 games, you don't deserve anything. Perhaps the old 35-50-15 was too little weight... anyone up for 30-50-20? :-)

Also, one would think the multiplicative KRACH would take care of this, but alas it doesn't. Quinnipiac (due to SOS I suppose) is listed lower than UAA. In fact it says UAA should beat QU about 7 out of 10 times. As I said once near the end of last year, my feeling is KRACH gives SOS too much weight, and this seems to back it up, IMHO.

[jtwcornell91]

DeltaOne81 '03 wrote:

[Q]I'm not sure what you mean by that.[/Q]
The way I remember it on USCHO in the past (in fact, I distinctly remembet them stating it in one of their 'how the PWR works' pieces, is that if an individual comparison is tied, then it's tied. Nobody gets a point for it and RPI is only used to break overall ties.

That is simply not true, and has never been.  No PWR ever published by USCHO has ever contained a tied comparison.  The pairwise comparison process, as described by the NCAA's Championship Handbooks, explicitly says that RPI is used in a tie-breaker when each team wins the same number of criteria:
[Q]
During the selection process, each of the above criteria will carry one point except head-to-head competition, which will carry the number of points equal to the net difference in the results of these games (e.g., if team A defeats team B three out of four games, team A would receive two points in the selection process). When comparing two teams, the team earning the most points will be selected.

If the point process provides a tie, the Rating Percentage Index will serve as the determining factor, regardless of the difference.
[/Q]

As evidence that USCHO has always done this as well, here is a link to a post on HOCKEY-L by Lee Urton, who wrote USCHO's original PWR program, discussing just this issue:
http://lists.maine.edu/cgi/wa?A2=ind9603&L=Hockey-L&D=0&F=P&H=0&I=-3&O=T&T=1&P=47310&F=
(In fact, this post predates USCHO itself.)

I don't actually see this explicitly stated in the PWR FAQ, so I suppose it should be clarified.

[Q] the new RPI scheme, which, IMHO, is much too skewed toward whom you've played as opposed to how you've done.[/Q]
Agreed, I know it's a MAAC team, but when Quinnipiac has 15 wins, and it's much higher than a team that's 1-17, I have issues with that. I don't care how good the teams you play are, if you only have 1 win in 20 games, you don't deserve anything. Perhaps the old 35-50-15 was too little weight... anyone up for 30-50-20? :-)

The problem is not that RPI weights strength of schedule too much or too little, but that it does it wrong.  Even with the new weighting, our RPI would be higher if we had swept Quinnipiac instead of BU.

Also, one would think the multiplicative KRACH would take care of this, but alas it doesn't. Quinnipiac (due to SOS I suppose) is listed lower than UAA. In fact it says UAA should beat QU about 7 out of 10 times. As I said once near the end of last year, my feeling is KRACH gives SOS too much weight, and this seems to back it up, IMHO.

Only if you believe Quinnipiac really is better than Anchorage.  Their schedules have been so different, it makes little sense just to compare their winning percentages.   QU is 15-3-1 against the MAAC and 0-3 against everyone else; UAA is 0-0-1 against the MAAC and 1-16-6 against everyone else.  Look at the breakdown of their opponents at
http://slack.net/~whelan/tbrw/tbrw.cgi?2003/current/Kcrit.AA
and
http://slack.net/~whelan/tbrw/tbrw.cgi?2003/current/Kcrit.Qn
and consider that QU has 31 points and their 16th weakest game was against Canisius, while UAA has 9 points and their 5th weakest game was against Michigan Tech.

[DeltaOne81]

I'll yield you the UAA/Qu issue for now, but on the tiebreaking thing:

[Q]Every team with a .500 or better RPI (ratings percentage index) is called a "team under consideration," or TUC. The PWR method compares every TUC with every other such team, with the winner of each "comparison" earning one PWR point. After all possible comparisons are made, the points are totaled up and rankings listed accordingly.

For instance, if there are 24 TUCs, the greatest number of PWR points any one team could earn would be 23, by winning the comparison with each of the other 23 teams. Meanwhile, a team which lost all of its comparisons would, of course, have no PWR points.

Teams are then ranked by PWR point total, with ties broken by looking at the Ratings Percentage Index (RPI).[/Q]
I guess it doesn't say specifically, but the line I read as important is "with the winner of each 'comparison' earning one PWR point." It says nothing about breaking a tie within a comparison. On the other hand it *does* specifically mention breaking overall ties, so you'd think if they were to break individual comparison ties, they'd mention it as they did with the overall situation. The exception that proves the rule (if they have to mention the tiebreaking procedure in one situation, it would imply that there is none when they don't).

Also, I'm pretty damn sure I remember seeing tied comparisons go to nobody in the past, but obviously I can't prove that now.

[Al DeFlorio]

I think UAA and RPI make for a better KRACH comparison.  

RPI has beaten St. Cloud, Duluth, and Wisconsin--and won five other games, besides.  UAA has beaten only Fairbanks in 25 attempts.  And yet the wonderful KRACH algorithm ranks UAA higher than RPI.  This, frankly, makes no sense whatsoever.

Nothing can account for this except gross exaggeration of strength-of-schedule in the algorithm.

[Greg Berge]

AFAIC, whichever one ranks us better is the better ranking.  Can we just get the NCAA to adopt that as the criteria?  It's much simpler for everyone.

[tml5]

Criterion ties within an individual comparison are not broken.  If Cornell and NoDak have the same TUC record, then neither team receives a comparison point.

If the total number of comparison points are tied, RPI (the rating system) is used as the tiebreaker, which makes RPI worth effectively 1.5 comparison points.  As far as I know it's always been this way.

For example, if Cornell and NoDak have identical TUC records, Cornell has a better COp record, and they have never played each other, the winner of the RPI category will win the comparison.  1-1 in comparison points, with the RPI tiebreaker giving the overall comparison to NoDak if NoDak has the better RPI.  2-0 for Cornell if Cornell has the better RPI.

PWR points are not used by the NCAA.  Each team receives a PWR point for every individual comparison won, and are ranked accordingly.  I think you may be confusing comparison points with the PWR points on USCHO.

[jtwcornell91]

Al DeFlorio wrote:

I think UAA and RPI make for a better KRACH comparison.  

RPI has beaten St. Cloud, Duluth, and Wisconsin--and won five other games, besides.  UAA has beaten only Fairbanks in 25 attempts.  And yet the wonderful KRACH algorithm ranks UAA higher than RPI.  This, frankly, makes no sense whatsoever.

Nothing can account for this except gross exaggeration of strength-of-schedule in the algorithm.

Or the fact that you're conveniently ignoring UAA's seven ties.  KRACH, RPI, just about any other method of evaluating a hockey team's record count a tie as half a win and half a loss.  UAA has tied Denver, Mankato, Duluth twice and Wisconsin twice, and they've got three other points besides that.  You're implying that RPI's record is 8 times as good as UAA's because they've won eight games to UAA's one, but if you look at points (i.e., twice wins plus ties), UAA has 9 points in 24 games, so they've gotten about one point for every four they've given up, while RPI has 18 points in 26 games, so they've got one point for every two they've given up.  RPI's record is a little more than twice as good as UAA's, but their typical opponents are a little less than half as good, which is why the two have comparable KRACH ratings.

RPI beat SCSU and UMD, but they lost to Princeton twice.  They beat Wisconsin but lost to Colgate.  They tied Brown, but also tied Union.  Keep in mind that this isn't HEAL where you get more credit for beating a good team than you lose for losing to a bad one.  Both RPI and KRACH would rate them the same if they'd beaten all those bad teams and lost to the good ones, which means the break-even mark on their schedule is somewhere between Brown and Union.  UAA's break-even point is Michigan Tech.  (Our break-even point is Ohio State, BTW.)