Crunching The Numbers
RPI Wizard Jerry Palm
By Tony DeFazio

PSR Editor Tony DeFazio caught up with Jerry Palm, who owns, edits and operates CollegeRPI.com, to talk about the RPI formula and what it means.

TD: How did you get started in all this?

Jerry Palm: I first have to note that I did not invent this formula, the NCAA selection committee did in 1981. I was merely one of the first ones to bring the formula to the public. Until very recently, the NCAA did not publish the RPI numbers - they had published the formula, but they never released the numbers. But I've been publishing all the numbers and tracking the tournament since 1994, and I did it for my own edification and because I was interested. I knew it was part of the process, and I'm a numbers-guy, and a basketball fan.

TD: College basketball fans are familiar with the RPI, but tell our readers what it is, exactly, that the RPI measures and how it goes about rating the teams.

Palm: The RPI is primarily strength of schedule and how you do against your schedule. The formula is actually pretty simple. It's 25 percent your own record, 50 percent opponents' records, and 25 percent opponents' opponents' records. So three-quarters of it is strength of schedule. And the 25 percent that's your own schedule, they weigh the wins and losses as to whether they took place on a home, road or neutral court. So you get more credit for a win on the road than you do for a win at home (1.4 points to 1.0) and losses are weighed in a similar fashion (-.06 for a loss on the road vs. -1.0 for a home loss). It is not a precise measurement of teams - you would not want to go to Vegas with this list and bet games. It's not that sophisticated.

But what it does do is give the committee an idea of which teams tested themselves and did well, and those are the types of teams they like to reward. Your own RPI is a pretty indication of the type of year that you had, but… no team is going to get into the tournament on RPI alone or get left out on RPI alone. But the kinds of things that get reflected in your RPI are a lot of the same things that the committee is looking for and the RPI really gives them a good benchmark, almost a starting place, and a way to try to broadly compare teams.

But the committee is not going to sit there and say, 'OK, everything is equal but one team is a 33 and the other is a 34,so we'll take the 33.' It never comes down to something like that.

TD: Are you surprised at how coaches have started to schedule with an eye towards the RPI?

Palm: No, not at all. No, because now that the numbers are out there people can follow services like mine and see the numbers every day. I'm not surprised at all. I think that's one of the things that's been impacted by people like me bringing the numbers to the public - people can now follow it, therefore they are more aware of it.

I think it varies from coach to coach and from program to program. I think it depends on what kind of a team you expect to have. Are the kind of team that expects to make the NCAA Tournament and hopes to get a high seed, or are you the kind of team that you don't have to worry about it and you know you're going to get and are just looking to get ready for conference play? For the Butlers and the Gonzagas of the world, it's a bigger deal. So it's the non-conference games where they get to make their hay.

If you are Pitt, you can count on the Big East to carry you. You don't need to do a lot out of conference, at least not to the degree that Butler needs to. They have to make their case for a high seed out of conference. So it's different for schools like that, and certainly for conferences like the Missouri Valley, the A-10, you see coaches try to schedule in such a way that won't adversely affect their RPI.

TD: Are the conference RPI ratings fairly reflective of the strengths of the conferences?

Palm: I consider conference RPI numbers to be for entertainment purposes only. I think they are deceptive because I think they more accurately reflect the bottom of the leagues and not the top of the league. Look at the big six for example - they all have pretty good teams at the top It varies a little from year to year, but they all have pretty good teams at the top. They all have iffy-tournament teams in the middle, and the difference is how bad is the bottom? The ACC and the Pac 10 are the top RPI conferences this year, because they have the better bottom of the conference. The Pac 10 has one bad team in Oregon State and the ACC really has no one that's awful. The Big East's bottom is reasonable, so is the Big 12, but then you get to the bottom of the Big 10 and the SEC and those teams are simply bad and they end up at the bottom of the RPI.