Bracket Revised - January 26, 2011

I like this one a little better.  After doing some analysis, Butler does not have an at-large resume and with a Horizon league schedule, there is really no way to get one from here.  I bumped Washington State into the field instead. 

I also made a few seeding changes based on a formula I am using to calculate a teams strength of wins and severity of losses.  Basically, it takes a teams wins and assigns a point value based on the RPI of the team it beat.  There are 346 teams in D-1, so a victory over the #1 RPI team at home is worth 346 points.  There are diminishing returns as you go down, for example, a victory over the #30 RPI team at home nets you 290.43 points (317*(317/346)).  A team is also awarded 25 bonus for an away win and 12 bonus for a neutral win.  Losses work as subtractions from the total in the same manner.  An away loss to the RPI #1 team costs you 1 point.  An away loss to the #30 RPI team costs you 56.6 points.  A penalty of 12 points is subtracted for a neutral loss and 25 penalty points for a home loss.  The points are totaled and divided by the number of games to get the teams score.  To keep a level playing field, only 16 games are used to this point to keep everyone's average using the same divisor.  All losses are counted, so if a teams has 5 losses, I use only the 11 best RPI wins (essentially, they are evaluated as as 11-5 team).  This seems to eliminate some of the wins against poor RPI teams that are largely ignored by the committee.  The rankings using this method were posted in the previous blog entry.