Lady Cajuns vs Southern Miss Part II

[derf]

Great game for the Lady Cajuns and great experience for the future. That game will hurt our RPI though as Southern Miss, the same team that took us to 11 innings, lost to a horrible Mississippi Valley State team earlier today. I may be wrong but we need to get wins over better teams than southern miss in order to get respect.

It only hurts the RPI if you lose to them, which we did not. And I think you are missing the forest for the trees. This team had problems last year when they ran into any sort of opposition. Southern Miss came in with a great game plan for their pitching staff (keep it low and slow) and exacuted it to a T. However, our ladies didn't lose focus and won one in grind it out fashion. This win was more impressive from a maturity standpoint than yoou give credit for. The pitching was stout all weekend, and the pitching and defense was clutch in several moments where either or both would have/could have folded last spring. These young ladies put on nothing less than a great show for the home fans. Not every win should or can come by run rule.

~I'm gonna miss left field

[Cajun90]

It only hurts the RPI if you lose to them, which we did not.

Actually that is not true. The RPI is a statistical composite of your opponent and your opponents opponents records. I am unsure of the bonuses used in softball but they probably mimic baseball and give bonuses penalties based on "bad losses/ good wins". You don't even have to play a game for your RPI to change. Losing certainly can have negative effects on your RPI but winning doesn't necessarily bring it up. Example: It is possible and even likely that if your a cellar dweller and your RPI is higher than say 150 and you play one game and lose against RPI ranked #1 team that your RPI will actually go up. Bottom line is that a bad team losing to a good team can actually help bad teams RPI. The reverse is also true. A good teams win against a bottom dwelling team could hurt your rating.

And don't even bother looking at the RPI until sometime in mid April. Anything prior to that typically does not contain enough data sets.

[derf]

Thanks for the breakdown, but I know how it works. The point I was making is that IT'S A WIN. A loss would have really hurt us, but the fact is we didn't lose. We are 8 games into the fricken season and chicken little is already yelling about the sky. Southern miss did lose to MSVS, but it was buy 1 or 2 runs and and it ended on a suspect interference call at second by that crack officiating crew we had this weekend. Trust me USM will get a few quality wins before the season is done and our RPI will be just fine. We just need to worry about us and stop with the week one hysterics.