RPI advantages BCS schools? Hardly.

Some in the national media have made off-handed comments about the RPI advantaging BCS-conference schools, saying fans of schools like Virginia Tech, Alabama and Nebraska are only complaining about the RPI because their teams happen to be ranked lower in the RPI than other NCAA Tournament hopefuls.

Not only are these "experts" wrong, but if you believe that the Pomeroy ratings are a much better tool at gauging teams--as most of them profess to do--then ironically the opposite is actually true. The RPI ratings seem to favor teams that aren't from BCS conferences, relative to more sophisticated tools like Pomeroy. Now of course, Pomeroy is itself not a perfect tool, but it is widely considered to be a much stronger measure, and in fact is often relied upon heavily by many oddsmakers. For these purposes we'll simply use the Pomeroy ratings as a comparison tool.

The following data is based on the Pomeroy ratings of 2/26 per kenpom.com and the RPI ratings of 2/26 per warrennolan.com. The only teams examined are those ranked in the top 100 of the RPI, since those are the only teams for whom the RPI could potentially be relevant when it comes time for the NCAA and NIT selections.

The full data is below the jump, but here are the aggregate results:

The first three rows are fairly self-explanatory. An "overrated" team is defined as a team whose RPI ranking is more than 10 spots higher than its Pomeroy ranking, while an "underrated team is defined as a team whose RPI ranking is more than 10 spots lower than its Pomeroy ranking.

Now, of course there are reasons for some of the teams' discrepancies. Let's take two well-known examples in the SEC for instance: Florida and Kentucky. Pomeroy measures teams' possession-by-possession performance against the opponent's relative strength. To overly simplify it, it gives you credit for how you play, while RPI takes nothing into account other than win percentage. Because of the nature of the systems, you would expect teams that win a lot of close games to be "overrated" while teams that lose a lot of close games to be "underrated". That's exactly what you get with Florida (ranked 20 spots higher in RPI after a ridiculous string of close wins) and with Kentucky (ranked 7 spots lower in RPI after a similar string of close losses).

These examples are natural fluctuations based on the differences in the criteria of the two systems. However, given the large sample sizes of both BCS conference teams and non-BCS teams, those differences should balance out, but they don't. BCS conference teams are disproportionately underrated, and non-BCS teams are disproportionately overrated.

Now, this isn't to say the RPI is inherently biased, and it's certainly not to espouse some crazy conspiracy theory that the NCAA is out to get the BCS schools (though that would would be rich with irony). It is simply to shoot down this baseless allegation that the RPI favors BCS schools, and also highlight which schools and conferences may be getting too much--or too little--credit from the RPI.

The "big boys" actually have several overrated teams in the RPI top 30 or so, but the problem comes the rest of the way, particularly in spots 50-100. There are some very badly underrated BCS-conference teams in this range, a big factor since several of them have NCAA aspirations.

A few final notes:

Conference USA is laughably overrated in the RPI. Here are the differences for the five teams in the RPI top 70: +53, +25, +22, +18, +16.

The Horizon League is also getting some friendly RPI numbers. Here are the differences for the three teams in the RPI top 70: +34, +27, +12.

The Mountain West's Big 3 are not badly overrated (+6, +6, +4), but Colorado State (+20) is.

The most laughably overrated league of all has to be the Colonial Athletic Association. Here are the differences for their six top-100 teams: +69, +34, +34, +26, +24, +3.