Dave Sez

RIP RPI

OK, they aren't really killing it, but it made for a better headline. What's really happening is that the good folks at the NCAA have decided to tweak the lame RPI. Good. What they are doing is taking into account the location of games, whether they are home, road or neutral. That's a welcome change, as the old RPI completely ignored this.

In my not-so-humble opinion, the RPI is still a fairly poor way to rate teams, but this makes it better. If they are going to use a computer ranking, I'd rather see them go with a real, sophisticated system like Jeff Sagarin's or Ken Pomeroy's.

The cynic in me thinks that they may be making this change purely because they don't like people knowing their "secret" formula. As you know, the NCAA has never officially said what algorithm they use and doesn't release their numbers, but many people have figured out what it was and put out their own rankings.

Joe Lunardi of espn.com gives a pretty good breakdown of the change and what it might mean here.