Division I Men’s Basketball Committee adopts new ranking system
The NCAA has developed a new ranking system to replace the RPI as the primary sorting tool for evaluating teams during the Division I men’s basketball season. The new ranking system was approved in late July after months of consultation with the Division I Men’s Basketball Committee, the National Association of Basketball Coaches, top basketball analytics experts and Google Cloud Professional Services.
I understand all of the problems with the RPI, but is an ambiguous black box model a better solution?
I don’t like the arbitrary quadrants in rankings systems and never have. Is beating a team away that’s ranked 70th really any better than beating a team that was ranked 80th? And it gets even worse the farther you move down. Teams in the high 100s are probably little different than teams in the mid to high 200s.
I’m not an analytics guy - in terms of knowing how to fix or or develop my own system - but it seems like there’s too much weight in quadrants and having top 50, top 100 etc wins.