R P I

I never looked at what it was. But after seeing that Purdue currently has an RPI of 28 behind cupcakes like Michigan St., Pittsburgh and Arizona (or, if you think those teams are good, Butler, BYU and UNLV). Also, Louisville (not a cupcake), whom they beat 67-59 in West Lafayette. 'How could this be'? I thought.

In their losses they've been beaten by an avg. of just over 5 pts/gm and 5 of their 6 losses came on the road. The one home loss to Wofford. Which apparently is killing them? I used to think we got no respect.

the following is cut and pasted from www.basketballprospectus.com to which there is a link on the right down there. I highly recommend it for setting up yo brackets.

The RPI is calculated by adding three parts.

Part I (25% of the formula): Team winning percentage. For the 2005 season, the NCAA added a bonus/penalty system, where each home win or road loss get multiplied by 0.6 in the winning percentage calculation. A home loss or road win is multiplied by 1.4. Neutral games count as 1.0. More on the effect of these changes can be found here.

Part II (50%): Average opponents’ winning percentage. To calculate this, you must calculate each opponent’s winning percentage individually and average those figures. This is NOT calculated from the opponents’ combined record. Games involving the team for whom we are calculating the RPI are ignored.

Part III (25%): Average opponents’ opponents’ winning percentage: Basically taking all of the opponents’ Part II values and averaging them.

so apparently wofford is 12-39, with over 2 dozen losses to the worst division 1 teams in America? I still can't imagine how Purdue doesn't have a better RPI. Maybe I'm just impressed that they beat us twice. They're just as good as us. But I guess beating Texas counts as much for you, as losing to Wofford counts against you. Makes sense. But... I'm sure it works out.