Editor's note: A portion of this article was featured Check in with every DI baseball team this offseason with and use code .
GRAPEVINE, Texas — At the Division I coaches’ meeting Thursday evening at the American Baseball Coaches Association convention, a handful of changes to the NCAA tournament selection process were announced.
In the 2024 season, players will be allowed walk-up music during the NCAA tournament. This allows players to choose their own entrance music in both the regional and super regional rounds of the tournament.
The NCAA has also made hotel availability for teams an explicit requirement to host the tournament, as visiting teams are now prohibited from being housed in dorms.
There were no changes made to the tournament format, the size of the tournament field or to the RPI, but rather, these changes are aimed at giving the selection committee more information ahead of Selection Monday and putting some additional parameters around regional host requirements.
The change most likely to have a direct impact on a team’s fortunes in the committee room is a tweak in how results will be grouped in quadrants.
Until now, game results were grouped strictly by RPI, with the quadrants as follows:
- Quad 1: RPI 1-25
- Quad 2: 26-50
- Quad 3: 51-100
- Quad 4: 101+
Moving forward, the quadrants will take into account results being at home, at a neutral site and on the road, as follows:
- Quad 1: Home games vs. RPI 1-25, neutral site games vs. 1-40, road games vs. 1-60
- Quad 2: Home games vs. RPI 26-50, neutral site games vs. 41-80, road games vs. 61-120
- Quad 3: Home games vs. RPI 51-100, neutral site games vs. 81-160, road games vs. 121-240
- Quad 4: Home games vs. RPI 101+, neutral site games vs. 161+, road games vs. 241+
Note again that this does not signify any change in how the RPI is calculated. It simply changes the way the quadrant records appear on a team sheet in front of the selection committee.
The selection committee will also have access to some additional data in the form of the Kevin Pauga Index (KPI). The KPI metric, created by Michigan State associate athletic director Kevin Pauga, has been used in men’s college basketball for some time.
Here’s the official language the NCAA uses to describe KPI as it is implemented in men’s college basketball:
“KPI ranks every team’s wins and losses on a positive-to-negative scale, where the worst-possible loss receives a value of roughly around -1.0 and the best-possible win receives a value of roughly 1.0. KPI then averages these scores across a season to give a score to a team’s winning percentage. The formula uses opponent’s winning percentage, opponent’s strength of schedule, scoring margin, pace of game, location, and opponent’s KPI ranking.”
Some of those factors, like pace of game, don’t apply to baseball, but that description provides an idea of what the formula is trying to accomplish.
According to the information provided at Thursday’s meeting, “the KPI will not be used as a selection criterion; however, the committee plans to use this results-based metric as a resource in the selection meeting when evaluating teams.”
One other change is a logistical one. Host teams in regionals and super regionals cannot use university housing for visiting teams, rather, they must be housed in hotels.
This came up last postseason when a lack of hotel space in Lexington, Kentucky, largely due to the presence of the Railbird music festival in town that same weekend, led to teams being housed on campus at the University of Kentucky.
Additionally, the current hotel distance policy for the first two rounds of the postseason has been adjusted. According to the official language, hotels must still be within 30 miles of the venue, but the requirement of hotels being within 30 minutes of the venue has been removed given the variability of travel times due to traffic and other uncontrollable factors.
None of the above tweaks are likely to fundamentally change the way the field of 64 looks come Memorial Day, but with the quadrant shifts and introduction of the KPI in particular, perhaps it’s a step in the direction of exploring more substantive changes to the selection process.
