Nate Silver Vs. The RPI Index

FiveThirtyEight:

The focus on quality wins, it turns out, contradicts another criterion that the selection committee weighs heavily: the Ratings Percentage Index, or R.P.I. The system, developed in 1981 in the era of the DOS prompt and the Commodore 64, tends to give computer rankings and other objective attempts at analysis a bad name.

Over the long run, R.P.I. has predicted the outcome of N.C.A.A. games more poorly than almost any other system. And it shows some especially implausible results this season. Southern Mississippi, for instance, was somehow ranked ahead of Missouri, even though it has endured seven losses to Missouri’s four (some of them against middling teams like Houston, Texas-El Paso, Alabama-Birmingham and Denver).

The committee’s use of R.P.I. is not quite as obsessive as you might think: more advanced systems like those developed by Ken Pomeroy and Jeff Sagarin were just a mouse click away, they told us — and it was perfectly well within the rules to look at them. The discussion of each team, moreover, was exceptionally thorough. It was clear from the officials we met that the committee has plenty of basketball knowledge and cares passionately about getting things right.

But R.P.I.’s fingerprints were all over the process. When a computer monitor displayed the teams that we were considering for the bubble, the R.P.I. ranking was listed suggestively alongside them. The color-coded “nitty gritty” worksheets that the committee has developed, and which often frame the discussion about the bubble teams, use the R.P.I. rankings to sort out the good wins and the bad losses.

In truth, almost any other computer ranking system would do a better job of what the N.C.A.A. is trying to accomplish.

Ouch.  That doesn't build confidence.  All I can say is a small school needs a tremendous record to get in the tournament, while a major conference team can have a losing conference record and still get in.  I'll back my father's suggestion: Scrap the conference tournaments (they are pointless and often screw the regular season conference champion in small school conferences) and put every team in the tournament, just like in high school basketball.