A little more on RPIs and "power conferences"

[LA Ute]

From the guy at CBS Sport.com:

What you need to know is that no BCS-affiliated school with a top 50 RPI was omitted this season, but six non-BCS-affiliated schools with top 50 RPIs were -- specifically San Diego State (34), Creighton (40), UAB (46), Illinois State (47), Saint Mary's (48) and Niagara (49). What that means is that for the fifth consecutive season, the three best RPIs omitted from the field belonged to non-BCS affiliated schools, which means a good RPI can save you if you're from a power conference, but it won't do much to help you if you're not.

[CardiacCoug]

The teams from strong conferences have so many more chances to get wins that boost their "body of work" over the course of the season. There are all the chances in conference games plus they can more easily schedule home games against good teams in the preseason.

Arizona gets a chance to beat Washington and UCLA in the conference season, along with Gonzaga and Kansas in the preseason (I believe all of those games were at home.) ACC teams can go .500 in conference, but they have 8 chances to beat Duke, UNC, Wake, or Maryland (for example). If they can win just 2 or 3 games against those elite teams in their conference, people point to those games as evidence they should be in.

Utah did things the right way in the preseason, with games against OU, LSU. Gonzaga has been doing things the right way -- scheduling some tough games in the preseason so that even if they mess up in the conference tournament, they have beaten some "name" teams from power conferences that people can look at for the "body of work" criterion.