WELCOME TO "RPI FOR DIVISION I WOMEN'S SOCCER" PURPOSE This website has three purposes: 1. The site's particular purpose is to provide information on what the Ratings Percentage Index (RPI) is, as used for college Division I women's soccer. The site's more general purpose is to be a resource for Division I college women's soccer fans and coaches who are interested in how the NCAA selects teams to fill at-large positions in the NCAA's Division I Women's Soccer Tournament, how the NCAA seeds teams in the Tournament bracket, and how the NCAA places teams within the bracket. This includes providing information on how the NCAA uses the RPI in the at-large team selection process, in seeding, and in bracket formation for the Tournament. 2. The site's second purpose is to provide Division I women's soccer teams' detailed RPI ratings over the course of each NCAA season. This allows fans and coaches to see how their teams are doing in the RPI rating process, to see how teams' RPI ratings evolve over the course of the season, and to better understand how the RPI works in real life. RPI ratings current through the previous Sunday's games appear on the "RPI REPORTS" page by Tuesday each week, once the season has gotten through its first three or four weeks. In addition, RPI reports for previous years are available on the "Reports Archive" page. 3. The site's third purpose is to evaluate how well the RPI does as a measure of teams' performance, to identify changes that might improve the RPI's performance, and to evaluate the extent to which those changes would improve the RPI's performance. ASK YOUR QUESTIONS AND GIVE YOUR COMMENTS Your questions, comments, and criticisms will help improve this website and are welcome. Please ask questions, give your opinions, provide additional information, and suggest revisions to the website. I've done some major research projects and reported the results on this website in response to questions and comments I've received. Simply click on "Ask Your Questions, Give Your Comments, Please" in the menu to the left of this page, enter an on-line name and whatever you want to say in the "Comments" form, and click "Submit." When you refresh your browser, your post should appear below the Comments form. The way this works on Google Sites, initially you'll have to scroll down to the bottom of the comments page to see what you've entered. I regularly visit this page and manually reverse the order of the entries so that the most recent is at the top. I apologize for the way that works, but it's the best I can do. PAGES I've tried to arrange the webpages in a logical order. Here's a brief description of each page (other than this "Home" page and the "Blog" page):
PRINTING WEBSITE PAGES To print a page from this website, click on the "Print" command at the bottom of the page. This will take you to a printable version of the page. Then use the "Print" command in your "File" menu to print the page. WEBSITE CREATOR/ADMINISTRATOR My name is Chris Thomas. I am a retired attorney who is a nearly life-long soccer fan. I played high school and college soccer in the late 1950s and early 1960s and have played adult soccer occasionally since then. I live in Portland, Oregon and am a University of Portland women's soccer fan. I have been head coach of the St. Mary's Academy (Portland, OR) girls tennis team for almost 20 years and am assistant coach of my granddaughter's U8 soccer team. I began studying the RPI and how the NCAA uses it for Division I women's soccer in 2006, in an attempt to understand why the Women's Soccer Committee did not select the University of Oregon to participate as an at large selection in the NCAA Tournament. I "cloned" the RPI at the beginning of the 2007 season using Excel and have done RPI calculations for all the Division I women's soccer teams over the course of the 2007-2010 seasons. I do my RPI work purely for the fun of it and to help build understanding, within the Division I women's soccer fan and coaching community, of the RPI and of the Women's Soccer Committee's decision-making process. My approach is to try to provide clear, accurate, and unbiased information about the RPI and how the NCAA uses it, as related to Division I women's soccer. When I want to express my own opinion about the RPI, I try to be clear that is what I am doing. My objective is to provide information in a way that will help readers form their own independent, well-grounded understandings of and opinions about the RPI. There also is some information about the RPI and how the NCAA uses it that I believe to be true but cannot absolutely verify. When I provide that information, I try to remember to include appropriate disclaimers so readers will be able to make their own judgments about its reliability. |