First look at UND’s Pairwise chances

I’ll go into some more depth in future weeks, but here’s a sneak preview of PairWise Ranking prognostication for the season–

This would have been a lot more interesting a month ago when UND seemed at serious risk of a lost season and I could have said something like, “UND needs to win the next 7 just to climb up to 20th”. Here we are at #19 with 14 regular season NCAA games remaining, and UND is definitely back in the hunt.

Here’s how this weekend’s games could affect its PWR:

The first thing that jumped out at me is how huge the spreads are — UND’s median climb for a sweep is 5 positions and fall for getting swept is 7. It appears that UND is just at a dense part of the RPI, but given that the PWR formula is new this year I’ll try to do some more digging.

2 thoughts on “First look at UND’s Pairwise chances”

  1. So Jim, is it the non-conference match-up that gives these games such a large spread, or simply the nature of where we are in the season?

  2. I’ll try to write a post about the changes in PWR soon, but in short non-conference doesn’t matter nearly as much anymore.

    In cutting the PWR down to 3 criteria, they basically made it way more dependent on RPI. The only way to take a comparison on which you’re losing RPI is to win both the common opponents AND get at least a one point advantage on head-to-head.

    I think the volatility this week is just because UND happens to be in a crowded part of the RPI table, such that it’s possible to move enough in RPI to get a big swing in PWR ranking. Eventually as we move up or down, we should see the upside or downside potential decrease.

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