It’s that time of year again in North Carolina. The playoffs are right around the corner, with volleyball’s draw being announced Thursday and football Saturday, Oct. 30.
This year, the N.C. High School Athletic Association is debuting the Ratings Percentage Index, aka RPI, to help decide playoff seedings. College basketball fans should be familiar with the rating. It includes three parts: your team’s winning percentage, opponent’s winning percentage and your opponent’s opponent’s winning percentage. It’s a way to try to measure how good a team is based on not just their record, but on who they played, too.
In North Carolina, winning percentage will count for 30 percent of the rating, the opponent’s winning percentage will be 40 percent and the opponent’s opponent’s winning percentage will be 30 percent.
That will create a number that will be used by the state association to determine playoff seeds. Like last year, teams that are conference champions – or the top 1A team in a split conference, as long as it finishes higher than third place – will get one of the top seeds. The seed number will be determined by their RPI rankings.
Every conference with a 1A school will get a berth, and teams with six or more teams in the same classification will get two teams into the playoffs. After the conference champions, the remaining automatic bids will be combined with the teams with the highest remaining RPI to fill out the bracket.
This system isn’t perfect, but I appreciate the transparency. Unlike the MaxPreps rankings, which aren’t clear why a team falls up or down in the rankings, the RPI draws back the curtain.
It’s also better than last season, where teams were placed into tiers based on conference finish and then seeds were randomly drawn based on what tier you were in. That’s how one loss Murphy ended up hosting undefeated Thomas Jefferson in the first round of the football playoffs in the spring.
Like any high school playoff seeding system, the RPI has its flaws. In basketball, the rating could be wonky early in the season, especially before conference play when teams have played around 10 games. That won’t be an issue for volleyball, where teams can play up to 22 games in the regular season.
However, it will be for football, where teams are only allowed 10 regular-season games. That could lead to a few fluky seeds, though with 34 1A West teams competing for 32 playoff spots, teams that think they were snubbed will have a chance to prove it.
The other big issue with the RPI is that unlike the MaxPreps rankings, it doesn’t include margin of victory. Murphy’s 56-14 win over Hayesville and Andrews’ 31-7 win over the Yellow Jackets both count the same in the rankings. That was one of the big reasons why college basketball scrapped the RPI for the NCAA Evaluation Tool, which takes into account not just your results against a team, but how good that team is and where the game is played and adjusts accordingly.
The RPI is easy to manipulate as well, as teams can schedule opponents with tough records to boost their rating. In football, teams could schedule home school opponents with good records, who are generally worse than public school opponents with the same record. It would count the same in RPI.
Will this be better than previous selection processes? I have no idea. It won’t go perfectly. It never does when it comes to high school sports playoffs.
Truth is kids ages 14-18 are hard to predict, and some records may be misleading due to the competition level in certain areas of the state. With the postseason about to get underway, we’ll find out soon enough.