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Sporting News, The, March 4, 2005 by Mike DeCourcy

It is a simple, direct question. Chris Lowery might not prefer a simple, direct answer. This is his prerogative. It is ours to ask, anyway.

"Do you feel like the coach of the 13th-best team in the country?"

Well, OK, so maybe the question is direct--but not so simple.

The reason we were asking was Lowery's Southern Illinois team entered the week 13th in the Ratings Percentage Index standings. You know, the RPI. Southern Illinois is having a heck of a season and is leading the most balanced Missouri Valley Conference in years, but the Salukis haven't beaten a brand-name team and have lost six games. Does this add up?

"Obviously, we're excited," Lowery says. "We went and played a bunch of games on the road. Having four seniors, I wanted to see how good we could be. If we were Illinois, nobody would be saying anything about it."

The genius of the RPI always had been its ability to deliver a clear picture of what teams were worth when the season nearly was complete and the NCAA Tournament selection committee was prepared to construct the field. So it may be premature to wonder if this season's change to the RPI formula threw things completely out of whack. If the committee uses the ratings to guide its work as closely as in past years, the bracket will have an entirely different look.

The RPI is calculated based on a team's winning percentage and its schedule strength. The change to the RPI formula grants a 40 percent bonus for road victories and a 40 percent deduction for home wins. The idea was to reward teams that play more challenging schedules.

But is it tougher simply to play road games as a mid-major than to go through a league schedule in the ACC or Big East? Southern Illinois entered the week as one of 15 mid-major programs in the RPI top 50. Under the old system, there would have been seven. That raises the question of whether the RPI, already doubted by many, has forfeited its accuracy.

"It's a little tough to say, until after we've gone entirely through a tournament and had the opportunity to look at what it does and doesn't do," says committee chair Bob Bowlsby, the athletic director at Iowa. "It's probably a little early in the process to be drawing any conclusions."

It's easy for Bowlsby to be patient. If he chooses, he can walk into the selection room in Indianapolis on March 13 and declare that changing the calculations--or changing them to such a significant degree--was a mistake.

Those who have no say in the process feel powerless. They do not know what the committee will do. In the past, they could rely on bracket analysts such as ESPN's Joe Lunardi and Jerry Palm of CollegeRPI.com to give them an educated opinion about how things would develop and what their teams had to accomplish to make the field. But these men cannot know if the committee believes in the new numbers.

"They've never done a bracket with this RPI," Palm says. "My thing has always been to put together a bracket based on what they've done in the past, and what they've done in the past no longer matters."

The committee uses the RPI partly as a guide to what teams have accomplished in a season, and mostly to measure how teams under consideration perform against the teams that rank highest. For instance, at-large candidate Arizona State is 0-2 against the RPI top 25, 7-5 against the top 100. The Sun Devils have a shot. But they'd feel better if the old system were in place, which would elevate them from their current No. 57 ranking (out of the picture) to 46th (considerably safer).

Southern Illinois, of course, likes things as they are. Under the old system, the Salukis would be 21st. Standing 13th is better. "For us, it's huge. In recruiting, it's something we can be very proud of," Lowery says. "We can send kids material that we have a higher RPI than a certain number of teams playing on TV every week.

"As a mid-major coach, as long as they're saying we're in, we're good with that."

That's about as simple and direct an answer as Lowery can offer. But it does not make any of the questions about the new RPI go away.

(S) Get the latest scores and standings at msn.foxsports.com, keywords: college hoops.

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