Not to beat this to death, but it is worth pointing out that, yes, "the women have a better record." But, for all intents and purposes, five or six of those wins in that better record essentially don't count because the committee sees them as one step away from playing D2 teams.
Yes, that’s a very good point, tjp.
Those totally cupcake games should basically not even be counted as games - neither for Wins purposes nor for Losses purposes nor for Games Played purposes.
And that’s exactly what Massey ratings does- it simply throws them out for all purposes. Or, I should say, it fractionally throws them out in proportion to their cupcake-ness. Automatically as part of the algorithm, it does the right thing, and largely crosses these cupcake games out of that part of the record that goes into computing the rating. After largely not counting the cupcakes at all, the Massey rating system then gives the Lady Gophers a rating that corresponds to a ranking of #39. This is a pretty fair ranking.
On the other hand, RPI puts those cupcake games (that we just agreed should largely not even be counted as Div I games), front and center in its evaluation. Since RPI is 75% based on needing to have a strong schedule, it crucifies any team like the Lady Gophers who commit the sin of playing too many throwaway cupcake teams. Thus an RPI ranking of #101 for a team that is more properly considered to be a #39 ranked team. Our properly deserved #39 ranking got launched into the #101 range by RPI. And improperly so, just because RPI is a piece of crap when anybody attempts to use it to evaluate basketball teams.
Now in contrast, imagine the following thought experiment. Suppose that the Lady Gophers have the same exact schedule and same exact results that they have right now. Nothing is changed except for the fact that we are going to evaluate them based on the NET system that the Men currently use.
Under that hypothetical thought-experiment scenario, the NET metric would artificially jack their natural #39 ranking all the way up to about a #25 ranking. Approximately, I’m only guessing. Because playing all those cupcake teams gave us so many wins with huge margins of victory, and that’s exactly what NET is looking for in order to give you a good rating. NET should also be ignoring those cupcake games almost as if they didn’t exist (like only Massey succeeds in doing). But instead, NET places an over-emphasis on the cupcake games - but in this case actually wanting a team to have lots of cupcake games in order to (artificially) jack it’s NET rating higher than it ought to be.
So right now the Lady Gophers are way out of playoff contention, merely because they use RPI for the Women. But if they were using NET for the women, then we’d be sitting pretty at about the #25 spot.
Both RPI and NET are crap. For opposite reasons. RPI damns you for playing lots of cupcakes. NET puts you on a pedestal for playing lots of cupcakes. When in fact, the cupcakes should just be ignored in proportion to their cupcake-ness.