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National Regional Ranking Predictions
The first public regional rankings come out on Wednesday. These are the rankings that will be used to determine the NCAA Tournament Pool C (at-large) bids. I’ve been tracking the West Region teams that have a shot at the Pool C bids but other than predicting the NCAA Field of 64, I haven’t looked that closely at the teams outside of the West Region. Well, “someone” asked if I was going to predict the other regions and my first thought was, “Heck, no!” I mean, it’s a lot of work and I have important things to do. I’m not going to get specific, but things…important things. After a full 30 seconds of reflection, I figured I’d give it a shot. (12 hours later and I cursed those 30 seconds of reflection.)
If you are unfamiliar with the RAC rankings then know that the NCAA mandates five criteria to be used in selection. These are won/lost percentage against DIII opponents, head to head, results versus common opponents, results versus RAC ranked opponents and Strength of Schedule (SOS). For the first public release of the RAC rankings, the committees don’t have access to who other regions ranked so one of the criteria isn’t used until the second week. That makes this exercise a bit easier.
For my data, understand that the won/lost percentages are suspect. The reason is that the NCAA site hadn’t updated so I went through the teams and conferences to get the records. These records do not exclude non-DIII opponents (careful, that was a double-negative). Then, I realized the NCAA site had updated so I did a sanity check on the records and some were off so I “fixed” them. I assumed they were off because they excluded non-DIII opponents (and another double-negative). It wasn’t until I was half way through when I noticed that Wellesley’s record was way off and Babson was wrong as I knew they had played a non-DIII tournament to start the year (sort of a triple negative in a way there). It was at that point I realized that the NCAA site had incorrect data for some teams. I had modified a handful of teams to that point but with no record of who they were I didn’t feel like going back and re-fixing them. Also know that the SOS data is from the NCAA statistics site (so who knows if that is correct). I will tell you that the RAC uses a slightly different SOS calculation than is released on the NCAA site. It’s all I have and it’s close enough for this exercise but just know that there will be some differences when the RAC data sheets come out on Wednesday.
Just to bore you more with my process on the assumption you haven’t already clicked on the prediction pages, here is what I did to get my results. I used Ned’s quality win index write-up he posted on Volleytalk as a starting point and wrote down all of the teams in his list. I then went through the teams I liked when doing my field of 64 and added them. I then added more teams to my list as I went through the win/loss records. For the 7 regions (I’m doing the West Region differently), I came up with a list of 105 teams. I may have missed someone, and I’ll kick myself come Wednesday, but that’s a quarter of all the teams in DIII for those 7 regions. Pretty stout list, I think. I then added in the won/lost percentages and the SOS percentages for each team. I then sorted the list of teams per region by SOS and then won/lost to get an initial list. I then went through each region and manually adjusted the ordering just based on these two criteria. At this point, I then dove into the teams looking for head to head and common opponent advantages, which carried me to the final rankings.
I don’t have a feel on how close these predications are but I tomorrow and my hope is that I’m close enough to the final results to avoid public shaming and ridicule. You can bet I’ll dive into any of the stranger RAC rankings to figure out who got sideways.
So, with all of that said, click the links below to see the rankings for the 8 DIII regions (the West Region RAC prediction is also in a separate post):
As a side note, since I started with Ned’s QWI list, I went back and found that 6 of my #1 seeds match with his.
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