(04-11-2018, 08:36 AM)ColoradoTree link Wrote:[quote author=BobK link=topic=18258.msg227658#msg227658 date=1523396916]
Track rankings like womens tennis are a of exceedingly large proportions joke. Stanford track stomps ×ÉÉ and thats not
Enough. Stupid.
I hear you, but it's something that's within our control to improve. It's a known algorithm, so tougher non-conference scheduling (it's not that we don't play good teams, we just need to play more of them), playing ITA Kick-Off Weekend, etc. Those are all things that could improve our ranking each year.Â
Of course, that wouldn't have helped us much this year, because Lord would have been out for those matches, and our ranking might be even lower than it is! But in an injury-free year, playing some mid-tier SEC and ACC programs early would mean we'd be more properly ranked in time for NCAA seeding, so we can avoid unnecessarily tough NCAA matchups. This year, we might be a top 5 caliber team when we're rolling and with Lord back. But if we're the 15 seed, we'll be playing the 2 seed in the Round of 16, rather than not playing someone that tough until the semis. Sure, you have to beat those folks anyway, but since this is a Directors' Cup thread, those extra 20 or so points most years would be pretty useful.
[/quote]
To follow up on this, the women's tennis rankings routinely and undeniably underrank Stanford once their computer rankings come out, in contrast to the committee rankings at the start of the year, which are a much better assessment of how good our team is. But the rankings are designed to reward teams with the best
resume, and thus can't do a holistic look and consider who they deem the best
team to be.Â
That said, the rankings do a pretty good job of where they slot most other teams, as most of the rest of the top 16 generally deserve to be where they are. With those teams, they play a more rigorous schedule, so any differences between "best resume" and "best team" have largely been smoothed out. I think there are generally two exceptions: Stanford and Pepperdine. With Stanford, we intentionally play a lighter schedule than the other top teams, so we have fewer impressive wins to our credit when it comes time to seed for NCAAs. And with Pepperdine, their ranking is often weighed down by the fact that their conference schedule in the Big West provides them very few opportunities to notch wins over good teams, which is how the computer rankings work (wins over good teams count more than wins over bad teams, and losses to good teams hurt your ranking less than losses to bad teams). I think Pepperdine has made efforts in recent years to mitigate this effect by scheduling an even harder non-conference schedule, but it still affects them to some degree. (Less so this year because they played in the ITA Kick-Off Weekend, won that to punch their ticket to Indoor Nationals, and proceeded to beat some excellent teams on the way to losing a close match to North Carolina in the final.)Â
In short, the rankings system is objective and a reasonable measure of a team's resume. Pretty much everybody else adjusts scheduling accordingly and tries to make sure they have enough ranked matches on the schedule to be up at the top at year's end. We have declined to do so, perhaps under the theory that the lighter schedule, with fewer non-conference road trips, means we're fresher for NCAAs. If that's the case, I can't really blame Lele, because you can't argue with her results. But I can't really blame the rankings system, because our resume generally
isn't as impressive as other top teams. This is where the new USTA college rankings are interesting, as they are a committee of folks in the tennis community that try and assess the question of who the best team is. Right now, they say we're the 10th-best team, while the ITA says we have the 22nd-best resume. I'd quibble with the 10th, actually, as with Lord healthy, I think we're better than 10th, but I can't argue much with the assessment of our resume. (If she'd been healthy all season, I think we still lose to Vanderbilt, but it's closer, and I think we beat Texas and Florida, and those two wins would put us comfortably in the top 10 at this point. But that's who we are
now, not who we've shown ourselves to be all season.) But you know that every spring, the coach of a top 4 seed looks at their path in the NCAAs, sees they're slotted to play like a 13th-seeded Stanford in the Round of 16, and they mutter expletives to themselves, because they know.
Lele has shown that she doesn't really care about resume-based seeding, because she presumably figures that we'll be good enough to beat just about anybody anyway once NCAAs roll around. When the standard your program has set is that NCAA titles are an expectation, whether you play Florida in the Round of 16 (which we did as a 15th seed en route to the title in 2015) or in the final (which we did in our runner-up effort last year) just might not be that big of a consideration. A different scheduling approach would probably lead to higher seeds, and thus easier paths in the tournament. We might not win any more titles, but we'd probably advance a little bit deeper on average, which would help Directors' Cup standings--I just don't think Lele cares about that. She knows that we'll make the tournament, and while we cut it close some years on getting that top 16 seed and the hosting duties that come with it, she rightly figures that as long as we're in the thing, we can win it.
(Sorry for hijacking the thread! It's
sorta on topic, though, right?)
