[CTcard]

Stanford remains #2 in today’s poll from D1Baseball and drops to #3 per Baseball America. Meanwhile, our RPI has plummeted all the way down to #22 and our SOS is #92. There’s already some chatter in Kendall Rogers’ twitter feed about why we’re still ranked #2. Looking forward to seeing what both sites have to say in their respective chats later this afternoon. Our seeding could pose a very difficult situation for the committee.

How difficult the situation will be for the committee depends upon the degree they insist on following the RPI. Over the years, there have been times the selection committee seemed to be moving away from giving RPI much weight and others where they have seemed ridiculously tied to it, such that I don't think there is any discernible trend.

Beyond the base fact that the RPI is not a very good power rating for anyone, there is also a mathematical issue for west coast teams. This is not because they are on the west coast, but because there are fewer teams overall in the west and there still is relatively little inter-regional play in NCAA baseball despite many games on the schedule. Thus, roughly speaking everybody on the west coast plays everybody else (or a good fraction thereof). This tends to drive the 50% of the RPI that is opponents' win-loss record towards 0.500, and even moreso the 25% that is opponents' opponents' win-loss record. That in turn, tends to prop up weaker teams and lower better teams - i.e. it evens out RPI values.

There are several power ratings that lessen this issue by improving the overall connectedness. Boyd's ISR is one I have been partial to (though I admit I don't know the inner workings of his algorithm). That system currently has Stanford at #3 behind UCLA and Vandy, along with a #32 strength of schedule.

Human rankings tend to have a different problem. The two biggest are a tendency to over-rank name programs and paying too much attention to loss count and not enough to strength of schedule. Those tendencies might overly favour Stanford, so it could be our general 2-3 rank in the human polls is a touch high.

Putting it all together, I would say that if the season were to end today, it would be an outrage if Stanford were not a top 8 national seed. But there is substantial work still to do to stay there as our remaining schedule includes the #1(tie), #4 and #5 teams in the Pac 12 standings.
The midweek games we have left are vs. Santa Clara (11-34), Cal Poly (22-22), and UOP (21-22) - and thus much of the reason Boyd says it won't be possible to get our RPI into the top 8 even by winning out.

[CTcard]

Stanford remains #2 in today’s poll from D1Baseball and drops to #3 per Baseball America. Meanwhile, our RPI has plummeted all the way down to #22 and our SOS is #92. There’s already some chatter in Kendall Rogers’ twitter feed about why we’re still ranked #2. Looking forward to seeing what both sites have to say in their respective chats later this afternoon. Our seeding could pose a very difficult situation for the committee.

How difficult the situation will be for the committee depends upon the degree they insist on following the RPI. Over the years, there have been times the selection committee seemed to be moving away from giving RPI much weight and others where they have seemed ridiculously tied to it, such that I don't think there is any discernible trend.

Beyond the base fact that the RPI is not a very good power rating for anyone, there is also a mathematical issue for west coast teams. This is not because they are on the west coast, but because there are fewer teams overall in the west and there still is relatively little inter-regional play in NCAA baseball despite many games on the schedule. Thus, roughly speaking everybody on the west coast plays everybody else (or a good fraction thereof). This tends to drive the 50% of the RPI that is opponents' win-loss record towards 0.500, and even moreso the 25% that is opponents' opponents' win-loss record. That in turn, tends to prop up weaker teams and lower better teams - i.e. it evens out RPI values.

There are several power ratings that lessen this issue by improving the overall connectedness. Boyd's ISR is one I have been partial to (though I admit I don't know the inner workings of his algorithm). That system currently has Stanford at #3 behind UCLA and Vandy, along with a #32 strength of schedule.

Human rankings tend to have a different problem. The two biggest are a tendency to over-rank name programs and paying too much attention to loss count and not enough to strength of schedule. Those tendencies might overly favour Stanford, so it could be our general 2-3 rank in the human polls is a touch high.

Putting it all together, I would say that if the season were to end today, it would be an outrage if Stanford were not a top 8 national seed. But there is substantial work still to do to stay there as our remaining schedule includes the #1(tie), #4 and #5 teams in the Pac 12 standings.
The midweek games we have left are vs. Santa Clara (11-34), Cal Poly (22-22), and UOP (21-22) - and thus much of the reason Boyd says it won't be possible to get our RPI into the top 8 even by winning out.