NCAA committee chair, Auburn AD John Cohen recommends overhauling selection process, RPI rankings

The NCAA baseball selection committee leans heavily on the RPI during the selection progress. However, not even committee chair John Cohen is a fan of the ranking system.

Cohen spoke with ESPN2 after the NCAA Tournament bracket was revealed and shared that he believes changes are needed to the system.

“There needs to be some group think and some statistical experts to come in and help us recreate this thing,” Cohen said of a ranking system. “I think basketball’s done a great job of changing their RPI, changing it to the NET, and moving in a different direction.”

Of the 16 NCAA Tournament host sites, eight are SEC schools and four more are from the ACC. There’s also Coastal Carolina from South Carolina that was selected as a host. Oklahoma State, Indiana State and Stanford were the only schools selected to host a regional from their conference or their area of the country.

Cohen believes that is an issue.

“The thing about baseball, as we all know, is it’s a geographical sport. So there’s advantages to warmer weather. We know that for the south, southeast, out west. And I would love to see it change,” Cohen said.

“Preparation in January and February is extremely difficult, and you have to make a lot of southern trips. It’s difficult. And I will tell you, there have been extensive conversations in our committee room about the possibility of adjusting the RPI to account for those things. Currently, there is nothing with the 16 criteria that we look at that says specifically that you need to be concerned with the regionality of a school. But maybe that’s something that needs to be considered in the future, because there are great players, great coaches in the Midwest and in the Northeast and that needs to be considered with future RPI, and it needs to be considered with the tournament, in my opinion.”

While Cohen would like to see changes happen in the future, he added that making changes with the NCAA Tournament selection process for this season was not an option.

Schools were given guidelines and a system before the start of the season, and it would have been unfair to adjust midyear.

“We currently have an RPI. It’s an RPI structure that we have. And we can’t move the goal post here midstream, because so many of these coaches in this field did a great job with the parameters that are given with RPI currently, of scheduling very, very well,” Cohen said. “So we couldn’t move the goal posts on those folks, but I think in the future there’s some things that can be done and will be done by the Division I baseball committee.”