NCAA Releases RPI

The RPI (Ratings Percentage Index) has become an important, and controversial, statistic for all college soccer teams to follow. It was designed to try to measure how tough of a schedule a team is playing. A simple explanation is that it measures your record, your opponents' record and your opponents' opponents record...(try digesting that once or twice!).

The RPI is one of several criteria used by the NCAA tournament committee to select and seed teams. Other criteria would include head-to-head results, common opponents and a team's last 8 results.

The NCAA women's soccer tournament is a 64-team deal. There are 30 conferences that get automatic bids to the "show". And then the committee selects the other 34 "at-large" bids by using the RPI and the other criteria.

All but 3 conferences select their automatic qualifier by a conference tournament. (The Pac-10, Ivy League and West Coast Conference each give their automatic bid to the regular season champion). So the Mountain West Conference representative will be determined at the MWC tournament in Las Vegas in November.

The RPI is pretty controversial as it is almost impossible to compare over 330 teams that haven't all played each other. And soccer only plays 20 games...so for you "math geeks"...you'll know that 20 is a very small sample size to try to use to compare all of these teams. A sport like basketball (30-35 games) or baseball (60-75 games) will have a much more accurate RPI...Nevertheless it is used.

The NCAA released the first RPI yesterday. Now with only 11-13 games per team...it is even less accurate...but it might give you an idea about how some teams are doing. The Utes are at 109...low do to our sub-500 record at this point. Updates will be released every two weeks or so...

See the current RPI by clicking here.
You can also check out the Wikipedia explanation for RPI and see if that helps!