RAC Rankings – Week 1 (10/17/18)

The Regional Rankings are finally out and, of course, we have a surprise team in our own little conference. Congratulations to UT-Dallas for securing the 5^th spot. The full rankings can be found here, but for the West Region we have:

1. CMS

2. UMHB

3. Trinity

4. Cal Lutheran

5. UT-Dallas

6. Colorado College

7. Whittier

8. Pacific Lutheran

There is a lot to discuss in these 8 little lines and I’ll get into the boring rationale tomorrow but for today I wanted to give some general thoughts.

CMS, UMHB and Trinity are as expected and as I predicted yesterday. I had a note after these 3 teams that said I really didn’t know how the RAC would value the criteria but obviously it wasn’t in the same way that I had it. I had Cal Lutheran 5^th after much internal debate and the RAC placed them one spot higher. This is a 9 loss team that has a great SOS (one of the best in the West Region) and they get the nod over Colorado College. Well, actually, they get the nod over UT-Dallas, which is the biggest shock to me in this ranking. Tomorrow I’ll try to break them down more and figure out what the RAC is thinking. What disturbs me is that Cal Lutheran has 6 losses to West Region teams and 2 of those were to teams not ranked here. Not counting their UT-Tyler loss (who would have ranked 2^nd in this list), UT-Dallas has 2 losses to West Region teams not on this list. Say what you will about Colorado College’s schedule but their two losses (total) are 5-sets to Trinity and WUSTL. This is not a criticism of the RAC at all; it’s a common result of the NCAA selection criteria as “bad” losses are often not considered where “good” losses hurt you.

Speaking of Colorado College, I tried to warn you all that they were in a bit of trouble. I don’t think 6^th is right but I’ll look at this tomorrow, too. Colorado College just doesn’t have the data points to compare against within this grouping. They have only played PLU and when the committee put them 8^th, it meant Colorado College could fall.

This list against what I predicted is actually sort of close if you ignore UT-Dallas. The RAC didn’t value Colorado College and Pacific Lutheran as much as I did. The big loser in all of this (besides Chapman) is Pacific Lutheran. If PLU is the 8^th team come selection and they need to be selected (meaning Whitworth or Puget Sound win the NWC) then they will stay home the second weekend of November. The West Region will not get 9 teams into the tournament. If the Lutes needed anymore incentive to beat Puget Sound tonight then they got it.

Whittier 7^th is now very interesting with their loss to Chapman last night. I assume Chapman is 9^th but it could be another team. One thing I need to look at with the data the RACs provide with the rankings is how Southwestern stacks up. I had them off of my Watch List awhile back but they now own a win over the #5 team in the region and have one of the best SOS numbers in the region.

Looking at the other 7 regions, I missed two of the #1 seeds – Calvin over Wittenberg and Berry over Emory. I’ll look at these two cases tomorrow but I knew those were coin flips. I’ll also look deeper into my predictions versus the first week’s outcome…you guessed it…tomorrow.

One last thing to throw into this is that the “Results versus ranked opponents” criterion will be in play next week. Tomorrow, I’ll take a look at which teams in the West will benefit from the teams that were ranked nationally. When I did my research for my prediction post earlier in the week there were a lot of tied teams in the West so adding this criterion could shift things dramatically for a number of teams.

UPDATE (6:00 p.m. Central) – For those curious, with this ranking, the West Regional host would be CMS. If the NWC is won by either Puget Sound or Whitworth and the NCAA only takes 7 teams from the west then the regional would be at UMHB.