BPI Rankings

So what is the BPI? Started by ESPN in 2012, it's one of many indices that rank college basketball teams by any number of factors. We're 107. Here are some of the rankings as of now of teams we will face this season:

Creighton 24
Arizona 26
S.Dak State 87
Ga. State 99

(A chance in these games to make a statement, and earn a better seed at the Big Dance.)

Bahamas Tournament:
Incarnate 334 (Our opening opponent.)
Miami-Oh. 193
N. Dak St. 169 (Probable second-round opponent.)
Towson 132
Pepperdine 286
Ga. Southern 127
Fla. Atlantic ??

(Based on BPI, we should be the favorite in this tournament.

Other notables:
N. Colorado 123
Port St. 145
Idaho 148
Weber 152
Eastern W. 158
Id. State. 264
Mont State 276

(Just goes to show what a lousy conference we're in, and the difficulty of improving our ranking once we get to the regular season. Hence the importance of the early season games.

citay said:

Other notables:
N. Colorado 123
Port St. 145
Idaho 148
Weber 152
Eastern W. 158
Id. State. 264
Mont State 276

(Just goes to show what a lousy conference we're in, and the difficulty of improving our ranking once we get to the regular season. Hence the importance of the early season games.

Click to expand...

Based on the numbers above, the top half of the Big Sky are ranked in the top half of the overall BPI rankings. I won’t go as far as saying the BSC is a good basketball conference, but those numbers seem pretty strong for the BSC to me. Last year the conference had a pretty good pre-conference record and moved up the conference ranks pretty well. I hope the conference collectively has another good pre-conference record this year. Even being a “middle of the road” conference in the conference rankings would be an improvement over the past 10 or 20 years.

Without getting into the math of it, I firmly believe that the BPI in it's original form was designed to provide an alternative metric to the RPI when smaller conference teams with decent OOC wins suddenly started sporting decent RPIs when Selection Sunday came around. They needed to come up with something else, so we started to hear about good RPIs, but bad BPIs, so the selection committee could justify giving a bid to a 18-15 team out of the ACC instead of a 24-9 team out of a "weaker" conference that had a better RPI. IDK if it is more prospective or retrospective in nature than the RPI, but it always seems like the non-P5 conferences get f'ed by it.