bprichard

Changing the focus to hockey was the right thing to do for Miami. Fan apathy for football and basketball was palpable during my time there, while the old Goggin got packed for every game (small place, but still). Oxford is such a drive from Cincinnati and Dayton that they just don't have the ability to fill up their football and basketball stadiums. I'm hoping that Miami basketball gets back on its feet at some point, since they are my second favorite team. Honestly I just don't care about the football team. Sometimes they're good, sometimes they're bad, but I never have any feelings about them one way or the other.

The basketball team don't have the players to be competitive this season, especially with Bill Edwards out for the year. Sullivan transferring was a big blow, too. We'll see what kind of players Cooper can bring in. It will never be the same anyway without Charlie Coles.

Nice win for Illinois over Gonzaga in Spokane. They could be for real.

X-band '01

For a while they did. Now they've rejoined the game in D-I.

And since you didn't say UNO, draw 2 cards.

NinerAdvocate

Not even a golf clap folks?

Deserves at least that...

PhoenixRising2

Absolutely.... clap, clap, clap
the Privateers are competing as an NCAA Division I Independent this season ... will begin play in the Southland Conference in 2013-14.

UMass87

antboy - sorry - haven't been on in a while. You're not really missing anything with regards to the weighting. Conference opponents do count more because they get overweighted in the opponents opponents component. This is why res and anyone else who has looked at the RPI carefully understands that the conference OOC performance is critical to good RPI (so that every team should schedule just at the level where they go something like 9-3 OOC). Nevertheless, the distribution of the opponents opponents component of the RPI is a very tight distribution around 0.500 relative to the distribution of either of the other two components (record and opponents record). Every team's opponents opponent component looks like the entirety of D1 (0.500) with slight overweight of the sum total won-loss of their conference. So, strong conferences have a slightly greater than 0.500 opponents opponents while weak conferences have less than 0.500 opponents opponents. The net impact is to reward strong conference members whose record is similar to those from weak conferences. The same happens, to a larger degree, with the opponents record component since that components is even more dominated by overall conference performance when comparing teams from different conferences. The point of all of this, though, is that the difference between 1.7% and 2.25% as a weighting for an individual opponent's record simply will not be particularly significant in your final rank order in RPI. On the other hand, the sum total of the increased weighting for each conference opponents will matter.

antboy

Ok, so the argument is that one team in conference is not that much more important than a single team out of conference, though they are a little more important. But having multiple teams in conference with strong OOC records will add up to a larger difference.

I can see that point. For the original point, it's ok to root Miami over Dayton since that game by itself will have little impact, but don't do so for every A10 team. On the other hand, I'd also bring up the other issues: the importance of conference strength and how the committee tends to use the rpi (SOS only) to choices made on the bubble teams, both of which would add to that minor difference. I.e. it pays to root for conference mates OOC for many reasons if you want to make rational choices.

But if you really dislike a team, it's probably still not enough to overcome that.