A Peek at Great Lakes Regional Rankings With Weights

I posted my fifth set of regional rankings earlier today, but they're a bit of a fake-out (especially when it comes to Calvin). The NCAA is changing the way they calculate strength of schedule (SOS) this year, and my rankings are still using the old method. The new method takes into account whether the game was at home, on the road, or at a neutral site, and adds a corresponding multiplier to the SOS component. Road games get a 1.4 multiplier, neutral site games are 1.0, and home games are 0.6.

I'm in the process of updating my rankings to reflect this change, but it's a tedious process. I did, however, finish adding the home/neutral/away weights to the teams in the Great Lakes region. Here's how it affects my rankings:

Rank	Team	WP	SOS	RPI	wSOS	wRPI
1	Olivet	0.667	0.540	0.572	0.699	0.691
2	Hope	1.000	0.561	0.671	0.561	0.671
3	Wabash	1.000	0.527	0.645	0.522	0.642
4	Wooster	1.000	0.547	0.660	0.517	0.638
5	Thiel	0.800	0.526	0.594	0.549	0.612
6	Bethany	0.700	0.520	0.565	0.564	0.598
7	John Carroll	0.600	0.559	0.569	0.590	0.593
8	Penn State-Behrend	0.889	0.492	0.591	0.478	0.580
9	Hiram	0.583	0.523	0.538	0.565	0.570
10	Heidelberg	0.500	0.497	0.498	0.589	0.566
11	Marietta	1.000	0.484	0.613	0.422	0.566
12	Wittenberg	0.667	0.434	0.492	0.531	0.565
13	Ohio Wesleyan	0.333	0.547	0.494	0.639	0.562
14	Ohio Northern	0.500	0.582	0.561	0.582	0.561
15	Trine	0.750	0.484	0.550	0.493	0.557
16	Frostburg State	0.556	0.535	0.540	0.548	0.550
17	Mount Union	0.417	0.495	0.476	0.593	0.549
18	Calvin	1.000	0.480	0.610	0.393	0.545
19	Geneva	0.625	0.513	0.541	0.507	0.536
20	Wilmington	0.333	0.532	0.482	0.592	0.527
21	Adrian	0.000	0.479	0.359	0.671	0.503
22	Carnegie Mellon	0.375	0.631	0.567	0.541	0.500
23	Muskingum	0.500	0.498	0.498	0.485	0.489
24	Thomas More	0.714	0.481	0.539	0.404	0.481
25	Otterbein	0.333	0.596	0.530	0.525	0.477
26	Baldwin-Wallace	0.364	0.529	0.487	0.509	0.473
27	Allegheny	0.333	0.588	0.524	0.518	0.472
28	Waynesburg	0.300	0.446	0.409	0.529	0.472
29	Denison	0.400	0.510	0.483	0.496	0.472
30	Capital	0.667	0.511	0.550	0.397	0.465
31	Albion	0.500	0.443	0.457	0.450	0.462
32	Westminster (Pa.)	0.300	0.470	0.427	0.515	0.461
33	St. Vincent	0.500	0.460	0.470	0.439	0.454
34	Kenyon	0.364	0.413	0.401	0.426	0.410
35	Pitt-Greensburg	0.250	0.437	0.390	0.462	0.409
36	Alma	0.667	0.295	0.388	0.321	0.407
37	Grove City	0.375	0.435	0.420	0.414	0.404
38	Kalamazoo	0.300	0.429	0.396	0.429	0.397
39	Washington and Jefferson	0.182	0.433	0.370	0.451	0.384
40	Case Western Reserve	0.400	0.416	0.412	0.374	0.381
41	Franciscan (Ohio)	0.200	0.437	0.378	0.420	0.365
42	Oberlin	0.111	0.340	0.283	0.315	0.264

WP -- in-region winning percentage
SOS -- unweighted in-region strength of schedule
RPI -- unweighted in-region RPI
wSOS -- weighted in-region strength of schedule
wRPI -- weighted in-region RPI

The weighting system causes Calvin to fall from #5 to #18. That's because they've only played two regional games--one at home, and one at a neutral site. Olivet, on the other hand, jumped to the top of the charts by virtue of not playing a regional game at home yet. Their weighted SOS (wSOS) is nearly 0.160 higher then the unweighted version, whereas Calvin's is 0.087 worse.

Some schools only see slight changes, and some don't see any changes. Hope, for example, has played all of their regional games on neutral courts, so their schedule strength remains unchanged (1.0 multiplier).

These rankings still aren't anything close to being official. The regional committees don't compute an RPI value -- they treat WP and SOS (or wSOS, as it is this season) as completely separate criteria, or so they say. That doesn't quite make sense to me, because WP doesn't tell you much without SOS, and SOS certainly doesn't mean much without an accompanying WP, but not much the NCAA does makes sense. They'll also adjust for head to head games and results versus regionally ranked opponents when, and if, applicable.

We're still pretty early into the year, so the numbers will be pretty fluid in the coming weeks. Actually, they never really stabilize very much. Even if Calvin loses to Hope on Wednesday, they'll likely find themselves in the top 10 of this list come next week. That is, if they also beat Kalamazoo.