VBelo Scouting Report: April 04, 2023

Easing back into it

Apr 04, 2023

We are entering the home stretch of the 2023 season. This week, the IVA and MIVA will complete their conference matches and prepare for their respective conference tournaments. The IVA does not get an automatic bid to the national tournament and none of the independent teams are currently under consideration (which is a shame). The seeding and home court advantages for the MIVA tournament are still up in the air.

Today we have a fantastic IVA match. Missouri S&T has had an outstanding inaugural season and they have a true star in Nate Meyer. This will be the last regular season match for both Maryville and Missouri S&T so this could turn into quite the fun match.

VBelo and RPI

I want to look at this more (probably after the season), but here is a quick comparison of RPI and VBelo. I simply graphed each team using their current RPI and VBelo rating. The trendline has a fairly good fit (R2=0.854) and helps divide the two metrics. Roughly speaking, teams below the line do better with RPI and teams above the line are ranked higher in VBelo.

The two most noticeable outliers to me are Concordia and Quincy. RPI seems to like both of these programs substantially more than VBelo does. I actually think there is a fairly clear explanation of this: Opponents’ Win Percentage (OWP). In RPI, OWP is half of a team's score. Personally, that seems like too much. Concordia leads the country in OWP. More importantly, the difference between Concordia’s Winning Percentage and their OWP is almost 0.500. This means that their opponents have won about 70% of their matches and CUI has only won about 20% of their matches. Quincy also finds themselves in the top 10 for teams who do much better in the OWP category than they do in the Winning Percentage category.

Since RPI weights Strength of Schedule so highly, teams who “schedule tough” get rewarded. This seems like a disservice to newer teams who often have the “weakest” schedules. VBelo, on the other hand, doesn’t penalize teams for their schedule. Every match can work in your favor. Just another reason I think RPI needs to be set aside and new metrics brought into the conversation.