The NCAA Division I Men’s and Women’s Basketball Committees will make public for the first time the official Ratings Percentage Index (RPI) for their championships. 

The RPI is one of many tools the committees use to select their championship fields. The first RPI rankings will be released February 2 and include games through January 30. Updated rankings will be at www.ncaasports.com through the rest of the season.

“One of the committees’ primary objectives over the last few years has been to increase the transparency and understanding regarding the process of selecting teams for the tournament,” said Craig Littlepage, director of athletics at the University of Virginia and chair of the men’s committee. “While the RPI is a part of the evaluation process, it is the subjective opinions formed by committee members after hours of observation and discussion that are central in the selection, seeding and bracketing. Still, we think that announcing the results of the RPI on a weekly basis has its benefits.”

The RPI, developed in 1981 to provide supplemental data in evaluating teams for at-large selection and seeding of the bracket, is only one of many resources available to the committees. Qualitative factors such as games missed by student-athletes or a coach and a team’s performance in the latter portion of the season cannot be reliably measured by a statistical model. However, such factors are among the details of each team considered by the committees.

With most of the 31 conferences that receive automatic bids to the men’s and women’s championships beginning league play in early January, the committees decided that releasing the RPIs later in the month would make for a more meaningful reflection of each team’s season.

“Making the RPI public is a new concept,”  said Joni Comstock, director of athletics at American University and chair of the women’s committee. “But what isn’t changing is our commitment to select the best at-large teams available and constructing a balanced bracket for our championships. The RPI is just one part of that process.”