Thoughts on a Gymnastics RPI

CRAIG BALLARD

Assistant Coach

Within our coaches organization, the competition committee is looking at everything, whether it is postseason, or we do our regular-season meets, or anything to improve our sport.

We thought the way basketball handles their postseason using RPI and the selection committee was pretty interesting, so we decided to take a look at creating an RPI for gymnastics and see how it comes out.

We are tinkering with an RPI based around winning percentage. It is calculated where 25 percent is your winning percentage, 50 percent is your opponents winning percentage and the other 25 percent is the winning percentage of your opponents opponents. It is all based on how you do and who you compete against.

The metric came out this season, and right now we are No. 6.

Here’s a look at the entire top 10:

1. Florida
2. Alabama
3. UCLA
4. Utah
5. Oklahoma
6. Kent State
7. Nebraska
8. Rutgers
9. Minnesota
10. Michigan

The next Mid-American Conference team is Central Michigan at No. 13.

Florida at No. 1 is the team everyone considers to be the best country right now.

I like the idea of having an RPI. I think it is another thing we for us to look at the sport. I think sometimes fans get confused by the numbers, the 195s and 196s, and stuff like that. This relates to a basketball fan who can say “oh, that’s their power index.” Maybe it will draw some more fans in and help people understand the sport a little bit more.

I also like that it makes winning and losing important. Sometimes gymnastics fans get confused when a team says it had a really good day, but then it lost to everybody.

Whatever happens on that gym on that day also becomes more important than who was judging it. Let’s say we go someplace far away and it is a low-scoring meet where we still win. If both teams are scored low, it is still great. We get our win point, and it takes a little bit of the judging out of it and puts it more in our hands.

While I like the RPI, I think we can tweak the formula a little bit because the actual No. 1 team in the country this week is LSU and the RPI has them at 11th. Maybe there needs to be a little tweaking there, but I still like it. It adds to our sport.

In this week's actual rankings, we moved up from No. 25 to No. 23 with our win at Ball State.

Here's some video from that victory: