I built an RPI model in Excel and replaced those 5 games with wins over Northwestern State and Arkansas State.
It isn't "exact" because I didn't go back and cancel those teams' games on that date and schedule other games for Alcorn, Mt. St. Mary's, and North Alabama. I also made the assumption that we'd stay 5-0, which is never a guarantee.
But, yes, our RPI would have likely been 8-10 spots higher had we played better (but still bad) teams instead of those 5 and won them.
This.
It's fine that you say it's true, but without some form of evidence, I simply don't believe that with the same record, but wins over 5 teams ranked 175-200, rather than teams ranked 275-300, our RPI would improve enough to be an easy host.
In other words, I don't think 5 somewhat better Quad 4 wins jumps our RPI enough to go from 22 to the 15 or so required to be an easy host.
It's the losses much more than the schedule.
it’s like this. We played both una and Missouri this week. Both were quad 4 opponents
beating una costed us 30 or so rpi points.
Beating mizzoui 3 games would have costed 9 rpi points
So if you replace one week where we play one quality opponent instead of, even if they are still quad 4 over mount saint Mary’s and their nearly 300 rpi, and take out the swac schools….
simply math says 30 rpi points times 5 is 150
Take what Missouri costed us (3 pts per game) and that’s 15 points.
Using the 5 games mentioned 150-15 is 135
add 135 points to our rpi right now and we are sitting at 13… a clear host
Yes the losses suck. If we ran the table with the losses. The rpi is probably at 13 too, but we are still selling ourselves short. Because had we ran the table we’d be 41-14 rifht now and our rpi would only be 13 and we’d miss hosting a super. We should have been in Georgia situation but we wouldn’t have been due to the scheduling.
any way you want to cut it. Our schedule gave us zero margin for error and has us one notch behind where we could/should be had we just made a reasonable schedule