A few notes for a Friday...
First, thanks to SI's Luke Winn for pimpin' the dance. Welcome to all new visitors.
You may be coming here expecting to see Nevada in the 3 seed line. Through Tuesday's games, they were. Unfortunately for Wolf Pack fans, while their profile essentially did not change the next day, the profiles of the teams around them in the S-Curve (Washington State, in particular) did change, and Nevada dropped to the 4 seed line by the slimmest of margins. Of course, losing Thursday to Utah State didn't help, and they are now more solidly on the 4 seed line.
With the increased number of visitors, I decided to go ahead and make a change to the Crashing the Dance oracle that I have been considering for a while. Until today's report, I was including (1) wins vs. RPI top 25 (i.e., good wins), (2) games +/- .500 vs. RPI 26-50, and (3) games +/- .500 vs. RPI 51-100 as part of a team's profile. (In the original project, we used Luke's excellent look inside "the bunker" to help decide what to include in the profile.)
Good wins are an important part of a team's resume, so RPI 1-25 wins are still in there. However, after a few years of running this, I think it makes more sense to look at performance vs. RPI 1-50 instead of 26-50 (and 1-100 instead of 51-100). Therefore, I made the change before the real bracket madness begins. (The main reason I use games over/under .500 is to try to capture both the number of games played and the performance in a single number. See this post from last year for more detail about how we chose what to include in a team's profile.)
