Q: An article in the AJC stated that the UGA basketball team will have to defeat “RPI” teams to be included in the NCAA tourney. What is RPI? Is it a cross-conference group? How are rankings determined and where is it listed?
—Karen Ermutlu, Alpharetta
A: RPI is an abbreviation for Ratings Percentage Index, a formula NCAA selection committees have used since 1981 to help rank basketball teams and seed them for the NCAA Tournament.
There are three parts to a team’s RPI.
Team win percentage (accounts for 25 percent): Wins and losses versus Division I teams are weighted differently. For example, a home win receives 0.6, but a road win counts 1.4.
Opponents’ win percentage (50 percent): This is attained by calculating each opponent’s winning percentage and then averaging those numbers.
The winning percentage of a team’s opponents’ opponents (25 percent): This is the average of winning percentage of the opponents of a team’s opponents.
“The RPI is intended to be used as one of many resources used by the committee in the selection, seeding and bracketing process,” the NCAA has stated. “It never should be considered anything but an additional evaluation tool. No computer program that is based on pure numbers can take into account subjective concepts, e.g., how well a team is playing down the stretch, what the loss or return of a top player means to a team, or how emotional a specific conference game may be.”
RPI can be found on several websites, including NCAA.com (choose men’s basketball under sports, then click rankings and choose NCAA Men’s Basketball RPI from the pull-down menu).
Andy Johnston with Fast Copy News Service wrote this column. Do you have a question? We’ll try to get the answer. Call 404-222-2002 or email q&a@ajc.com (include name, phone and city).
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