BRIDGEPORT, Pa. — To commence a periodically published series on facts and figures that have bearing on the sport of water polo, the Collegiate Water Polo Association (CWPA) releases the data referred to as “The Nitty-Gritty” report on National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) women’s water polo through the final regular season games of the 2018 women’s water polo regular season on April 25.
So what is the “Nitty-Gritty” report? The report is a comparison of teams based on their rating percentage index, commonly known as the RPI. The RPI is a quantity used to rank sports teams based upon a team’s wins and losses and its strength of schedule. This system has been in use in college basketball since 1981 to aid in the selecting and seeding of teams appearing in the men’s playoffs and for the women’s tournament since its inception in 1982. Further, it is currently used in other sports including baseball, soccer, field hocky, volleyball and water polo, among others to rank teams for at-large berths and seeding in the NCAA Championship field.
A few factors are weighed in calculating RPI scores:
- Overall record
- Road record
- Last 10 games
- Record against RPI’s in 1-10, 11-20, 21-40, 41-63
- Record against Top 10
- Record against Top 20
The last available NCAA “Nitty-Gritty” report includes all games during the regular season, but does not include the conference (CWPA, Western Water Polo Association, Big West Conference, Mountain Pacific Sports Federation, Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference, Western Water Polo Association, Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference) championship tournaments.
Based exclusively on competition through April 25, five CWPA teams were ranked among the Top 25 on the report with the University of Michigan (No. 8), Princeton University (No. 9), Hartwick College (No. 12), Indiana University (No. 14), Harvard University (No. 22) and George Washington University (No. 24) making the cut. Bucknell University (No. 26) barely missed a spot in the Top 25 as the Bison were edged out by California Baptist University (No. 25).
The first 10 spots in the report belonged to the University of Southern California (No. 1), Stanford University (No. 2), the University of California-Los Angeles (No. 4), the University of Hawaii (No. 5), Arizona State University (No. 6), University of the Pacific (No. 7), Michigan, Princeton and the University of California-Irvine (No. 10).
Among the ranked 63 NCAA women’s water polo programs, the rest of the CWPA membership came in at: Macalester College (No. 29), Brown University (No. 31), Saint Francis University (No. 40), Connecticut College (No. 41), Carthage College (No. 42), Monmouth College (No. 48), Penn State Behrend (No. 55), Washington & Jefferson College (No. 56), Grove City College (No. 59) and Utica College (No. 61).
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