Feb. 1, 2006
INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. -- The NCAA Division I Women's Basketball Committees announced that they will make public for the first time the official Ratings Percentage Index (RPI) for their respective championships. The official RPI is used as one of many tools to select teams to participate in the championships. In the first released RPI, the Lady Monarchs are listed at No. 17 out of the 332 schools featured.
The RPI, developed in 1981 to provide supplemental data in the evaluation of teams for at-large selection and seeding of the championship bracket is only one of many pieces of information available to the committees. Qualitative factors such as games missed by student-athletes or coaches 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 championship 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.
"We chose this point of the season to release the RPI because the composition of each team's schedule is comprised of a blend of non-conference and conference games," said Joni Comstock, director of athletics at American University and chair of the NCAA Division I Women's Basketball Committee. "Making the RPI ranking public is a new concept; 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."
Old Dominion leads the Colonial Athletic Association (CAA) in RPI, followed by four other schools in the top 100. Delaware sit at No. 47, followed by James Madison at No. 66, Hofstra at No. 84, and Virginia Commonwealth at No. 94.
The Lady Monarchs, who are playing on of their most difficult schedules in history featuring five ranked opponents in the recent polls, including four in the nation's top ten, have three schools on their schedule that are making an appearance in the RPI's top 10. Tennessee tops the RPI report followed by North Carolina at No. 3, and Duke at No. 5. Rutgers, another top 10 team, appears at No. 13.
The Lady Monarchs return to action this weekend hosting Drexel on Friday and Northeastern on Sunday.
To view the complete NCAA RPI report click here or log onto www.ncaasports.com.