National Collegiate Athletic Association

Latest News

« back to 2011 | Back to NCAA News Archive Index

Baseball committee recommends changes to RPI

By Greg Johnson
NCAA.org

The Division I Baseball Committee recommended changes to the Rating Percentage Index calculation that will be applied beginning with the 2013 season.

The revised RPI formula will value each road victory as 1.3 instead of 1.0. Each home win will be valued at 0.7 instead of 1.0. Conversely, each home loss will count 1.3 against a team’s RPI and each road loss will count 0.7 against a team’s RPI.

Neutral-site games will retain the same value of 1.0, but the committee is studying how to determine if a game should be considered a neutral-site contest.

The weighting is based on data showing that home teams win about 62 percent of the time in Division I baseball.

An institution’s RPI will still consist of the following three factors:

• Division I winning percentage (25 percent of the RPI)
• Opponent’s Division I winning percentage (50 percent of the RPI)
• Opponents’ Opponents’ Division I winning percentage (25 percent of the RPI)

Since this is a change to the selection criteria, the Division I Championships/Sports Management Cabinet must approve the proposal.

The proposed change is similar to the changes made in Division I men’s and women’s basketball, in which road wins are weighted as 1.4 and home victories are weighted at 0.6. That was based on statistical data that consistently showed home teams in Division I basketball winning about two-thirds of the time.

The baseball committee decided to make the changes because of the discrepancy in the number of home games teams play. Some schools are able to play 35-40 of their 56 allowable games at home, while other teams, due to factors such as weather, may play only 20 home games.

Committee members still stress that the RPI is only one of several tools they use in the selection and seeding process.

Another part of the proposal is that no bonuses or penalties would be awarded in the RPI beginning in 2013.

Currently, teams receive bonus points for beating top-75 nonconference opponents on the road and penalty points for losing to bottom-75 nonconference opponents at home. Bonuses and penalties are on a sliding scale, separated into groups of 25, with the top bonus for a road win against a top-25 team and the worst penalty for a home loss to a bottom-25 opponent.