The NCAA will consider road wins as more valuable than home wins in the formula that selects the at-large teams for the Division I men’s tournament starting this season.
Also, the Division I Men’s Ice Hockey Committee reintroduced a bonus system that rewards teams for victories over top-ranked teams in the Ratings Percentage Index and eliminated the criterion of comparing teams against other teams under consideration.
USCHO represents the selection criteria via the PairWise Rankings.
Stay with USCHO for more on the changes. In the meantime, here’s the memo on this year’s changes from the NCAA:
Division I Men’s Ice Hockey — 2013-14 Selection Criteria Changes
Ratings Percentage Index — Home and Away Weighting
The Ratings Percentage Index (RPI) is calculated using three factors with weightings as follows: 25% Winning Percentage, 21% Opponents’ Winning Percentage, and 54% Opponents’ Opponents’ Winning Percentage.In calculation of the index, wins on the road and losses at home shall have a weighting factor of 1.2. Wins at home and losses on the road shall have a weighting factor of 0.8. All neutral-site games have a weighting factor of 1.0. A tie is one-half of a win and one-half of a loss, so home/road ties are treated accordingly for the teams involved.
Once the index has been fully established any team with an RPI that is adversely impacted by a win over any opponent shall have that game removed from the computation and its RPI recalculated based on remaining games.
Quality Wins Bonus
The Quality Wins Bonus is implemented to reward performance against the strongest competition, as measured by the top 20 teams in the RPI (calculated per above).The maximum bonus of 5.00 points in any single game is earned with a win against the #1 team in the RPI. A bonus of 4.75 points is earned for a win against the #2 team, 4.50 is earned for a win against the #3 team, and so on until the smallest bonus of 0.25 points, which is earned for a win against the #20 team.
As a tie is one-half of a win, the bonus for a tie against any top 20 team is one-half of the corresponding win bonus against the same team.
The amount of bonus for any game is multiplied by the appropriate game-site factor consistent with the calculation of the RPI. If the win (or tie) takes place on the road the amount of bonus is multiplied by a factor of 1.2. If the win (or tie) takes place at home the amount of bonus is multiplied by a factor of 0.8. The bonus is unchanged for a win (or tie) at a neutral site.
Once the total bonus points have been calculated they are divided by the total weighting of all games played per the RPI calculation (with road wins/home losses weighted with a factor of 1.2 and home wins/road losses weighted with a factor of 0.8). The resulting Quality Wins Bonus (QWB) is added to the original RPI to obtain the final RPI for each team. This is the value to be used in comparing any two teams, along with the other selection criteria.
Record Against Teams with 50.00 or greater RPI
The selection criterion of Record Against Teams with an RPI of 50.00 or greater has been eliminated. Correspondingly, all Division I teams are compared against one another using the criteria of RPI (including QWB), head-to-head record, and record against common opponents.
