I stand corrected.......
RPI Impact on Selection and Seeding
Feb 28
At this time of year, I get a lot of e-mails from fans arguing their favorite team's case vs another and the first thing on their list of arguments is almost always "our RPI is higher," and sometimes it would seem significantly higher. However, that is not really much of an argument. The reality is that RPI does not play too much of a role in the selection, and especially the seeding, processes.
Essentially, The role of the RPI is to sort out the wheat from the chaff. It is primarily a measure of a team's strength of schedule and how the team did against its schedule. It is not a perfect measure and the committee knows that, which is why they consider so many other factors. However, it is a good enough measure to help sort out which teams should be considered and which should not. If a team's RPI is high enough, it will get serious consideration. The definition of "high enough" appears to be 60th or better. Only three of the 274 at-large bids in the last eight years have come from outside the top 60. After that, the other qualities the committee considers take over. Among those qualities is good wins, bad losses, record vs better teams, record vs teams under consideration, conference performance, non-conference schedule and performance, performance away from home, etc. Read the Bracketology page for more on that.
Of course, there is a decent correlation between teams that are good in the other factors and teams that are good in the RPI, but not enough to say that the RPI is a good seed predictor. Only 42% of teams (218 of 513) in the last eight years have been seeded exactly where their RPI would indicate. Not surprisingly, the RPI seeding accuracy is best at either end of the bracket, and especially at the bottom. If you only consider the 5-12 seeds, the RPI has correctly predicted a team's seed only 25% of the time, but 36% are seeded at least two spots away from RPI prediction. I think it is pretty obvious that the committee is not letting the RPI dictate to them where teams should be seeded.
Teams are also not necessarily seeded in order of conference standing or RPI among teams in the same conference, though that is more typical. If your team is behind another team in the conference standings that is not tournament-worthy, then your team's chances to get in are not very good. However it is not terribly unusual to see one team with a worse conference record receive a higher seed than another team from the same conference. Usually that is because of a marked difference in non-conference performance or perhaps a difference in conference tournament performance.
This is why there is more art than science to bracket guessing.
