Posted by Purple Pride on 6/14/2012, 9:12 pm, in reply to "WCC Commissioner's Cup"
Sad times for the Portland Pilots in this year's Commissioner's Cup. Ouch.
And thanks for the shout out re: BYU. Here's the original post, just for fun: http://members4.boardhost.com/donscentral/msg/archive/1283061945.html
My predictions vs. reality:
Women's Soccer: 3rd (4th)
Men's Tennis: 3rd (4th)
Women's Tennis: 3rd (6th)
Men's Golf: 3rd (3rd)
Women's Golf: 3rd (6th)
Volleyball: 4th (3rd)
Men's BB: 2nd (3rd)
Women's BB: 2nd (2nd)
Men's XC: 2nd (1st)
Women's XC: 1st (2nd)
Baseball: 7th (7th)
What's interesting (to me, anyway) is that they only out-performed my predictions in two sports men's XC (which was a toss-up anyway) and volleyball. Yet they under-performed in six sports.
Also worth pointing out? BYU won exactly one conference championship - in men's cross country. Their last season in the MWC? They won nine.
Long story short? The WCC is legit.
As for why BYU "underperformed" in my predictions... because I used RPI rankings and other similar rankings to make my initial comparisons, that just leads me to believe that the WCC is perpetually under-ranked in such "objective" measures. There is a poster on the UP board that has gone super in-depth into soccer RPI rankings, and he has conclusively proved that teams on the west coast (especially smaller conferences) are pretty much criminally discriminated against in the RPI rankings. We see it in soccer and baseball for sure, and I bet it happens in volleyball, golf, tennis, etc as well.
The problem, in a nutshell, is that due to travel costs and time, teams from the west generally only play other teams from the west, while teams in the midwest, south, and northeast are able to play more teams from various geographical regions, which the computers like because that helps create wider sample sizes. The computers struggle to properly place west coast teams in the rankings because they can't adequately compare them against other regions without more inter-regional games.
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