RIIL rolling out new RPI-based plan in the fall. Here's why it doesn't do enough
The Rhode Island Interscholastic League’s new realignment for football was never going to please everyone.
Making every school, athlete and parent happy shouldn’t be the point. Finding a fair and equitable way to create a level playing field with an equitable reward should be.
The new rating percentage index, or RPI, system the league has introduced and will roll out this fall may be a good idea on paper. But, in reality, it fails to change a system that has yet to succeed.
With football’s new realignment, the RIIL wanted four divisions broken up as evenly as possible, which makes sense. With the RPI playoff system, programs are given an option: Have the RIIL schedule either 80% or 50%, of division games. The rest would be put in the already-full hands of coaches and athletic directors, who will now have an extra task with no financial compensation.
Games are now weighted, so a Division I team that goes 5-5 but plays all D-I teams, could make the postseason over a team that goes 6-2 but played the majority of its schedule against lesser teams.
For lower divisions, playing teams above you is a win-win situation because a loss won’t hurt you as much as one in your own division.
The league views this as a good thing. Good teams that think they can contend for titles will play teams as scheduled or try to play out-of-state games against tougher competition. Teams that feel they’re down or in the wrong division can schedule lower division teams, or out-of-state ones, and try to rebuild through those channels.
One big drawback in this system is the idea that these already underpaid coaches and ADs must now put these schedules together. Another is the uncertainty of what earning points in the RPI actually gets you.
Most high school leagues use some sort of RPI system for their postseason tournaments. Teams play a regionalized regular-season schedule and are allowed to schedule other games out of district or out of state and they have managed to put together a playoff system that works.
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While many pine for a regionalized schedule in Rhode Island, let’s be honest — it’s totally unnecessary. Creating divisions makes sense from a competitive standpoint, but the RIIL needs a better formula when creating those divisions. Things like community facilities, feeder programs and — the elephant in the room nobody wants to talk about: gross income per capita — should be part of the equation.
Doing that would require an actual data analyst or a statistical expert. Instead, we’re stuck with a bad formula. The RIIL should start from scratch and adopt something closer to promotion/regulation, in which teams are annually moved up and down based on previous success.
But the biggest problem with RPI is it still doesn’t help reward actual champions. The RIIL, the schools, the media — present company included — throw flowers at Division III and Division IV champions without saying what they really are.
Ready to rip this Band-Aid off? They aren’t state champions. They’re the 20th- or 30th-best teams in the state. When you talk about everyone getting a trophy, this is the definition of it, and no one has ever explained why it’s fair that the 10th-best team in the state can’t compete in the playoffs but the 34th-best is allowed to celebrate a championship at Cranston Stadium.
The RPI could fix this in one of two ways. The easiest would be ignoring divisions altogether and splitting up the postseason into X number of tournaments based solely on RPI. The issue with that is you run into the same problem — where a mediocre team gets to compete for a title simply because it was better than the other mediocre teams.
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If RPI is going to become a thing in the state, then it’s time to finally do what many other states do: introduce a classified postseason.
For football, it would be very easy to do. Play your division schedule and use RPI to break the postseason down into four tournaments — Large School, Medium School, Small School, Private School. If St. Raphael and Moses Brown are offended by this notion, create a Small Private School Super Bowl. We’ve got five of them with the current system anyway; might as well do it with this one as well.
How would that break down? Small schools have a male enrollment of 400 or fewer (Juanita Sanchez is the smallest with 168, Burrillville is the largest with 369); medium schools are 401-550 (Portsmouth is the smallest with 401, North Providence the largest at 548); large schools are 551 and up (Barrington was the smallest at 555, East Providence was the largest at 875). That puts 12 schools in small, 13 in medium and 14 in large and as enrollment changes, realigning classes to keep them close wouldn’t be difficult.
How do you qualify for the playoffs? Simple math rather than a complex formula. Wins are worth 4 points against a Division I school, 3 against Division II, 2 against Division III and one against Division IV. A loss to Division I costs you nothing, a loss to D-II means you lose a point, a loss to Division III is minus 2, a loss in Division IV is minus 4.
What would this do to the playoff structure?
Using last year’s standings, and taking liberties because of the four-team Division I, every team that made last year’s playoffs would have qualified under a classified format except for Coventry, which had the ninth-biggest enrollment but was playing in Division III and wouldn’t have earned enough points to qualify in a Large School playoff.
In short, there would be no dramatic changes. Your postseason structure wouldn’t change, but it would allow us to truly call teams state champions.
This plan would provide what the RIIL wants — a competitive regular season and a postseason system that should be equally competitive. You could make a six- or eight-team playoff in each class and the teams that should be there would be there.
A classified postseason puts everyone on an even field. Burrillville and Westerly can continue to challenge themselves with a difficult regular-season schedule against Division I and II opponents, knowing it’s going to make them better for a Small School Super Bowl run. A program like Davies would have been allowed to have success in Division IV, then see if it had what it takes to contend with other midsize schools. That midsize tournament would annually be the toughest to qualify for and force programs to grow instead of relying on moving up or down in order to win titles.
It also allows Hendricken and La Salle to continue to play one another in a huge game that would still matter. It gives St. Raphael and Moses Brown a chance to play for a Super Bowl to help grow their programs as well — and if you want to get wild, the winners of those games could play one another the week afterward.
The RIIL will say that schools don’t want this and they’re not wrong. The schools who don’t want a classified system don’t want this because it will expose their flaws. It will show which schools are putting the time and effort into building programs in their communities and which ones aren't.
Sports that have proper state championship events — namely cross country, track and swim — should continue to operate as such. Basketball should switch to a classified postseason, then host a proper 16-team State Tournament in which those teams can be celebrated for qualifying.
In sports where participation is low — field hockey, ice hockey — a small-field classified tournament followed by a proper state tourney also solves problems.
Are there holes in this classified plan? Probably. But it’s drastically different and that’s what’s needed. The proposed RPI system is a slightly modified version of what’s been done in the past, over and over again, where different results have been expected but have all led to the same place.
And we know what it’s called when we do that.
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RIIL's new football divisions, with last year's records
Division IBarrington (6-0 D-IIA)Burrillville (4-2 D-IIB)Central (0-3 D-I)Cranston West (2-4 D-II)Cumberland (6-0 D-IIA)Hendricken (3-0 D-I)La Salle (2-1 D-I)North Kingstown (1-2 D-I)Portsmouth (3-3 D-IIB)St. Raphael (4-2 D-IIA)
Division IICoventry (4-3 D-IIIA)Lincoln (6-1 D-IIIA)East Providence (2-4 D-IIA)Middletown (6-1 D-IIIA)Mount Pleasant (3-3 D-IIA)Moses Brown (5-2 D-IIIB)South Kingstown (3-3 D-IIB)Tolman (5-2 D-IIA)Shea (0-6 D-IIBWesterly (5-1 D-IIB)Woonsocket (2-4 D-IIA)
Division IIICentral Falls (D-IV)Chariho (0-6 D-IIIA)Classical (4-3 D-IIIA)Cranston East (1-5 D-IIA)East Greenwich (D-IIA)Johnson (6-1 D-IIIB)Mt. Hope (0-7 D-IIIB)North Providence (5-3 D-IV)Pilgrim (3-4 D-IIIB)Ponaganset (5-2 D-III)Rogers (2-5 D-IIIB)
Division IVDavies (8-0 D-IV)Exeter-West Greenwich (7-1 D-IV)Hope (1-7 D-IV)Juanita Sanchez (4-4 D-IV)Narragansett (1-6 D-III)North Smithfield (2-5 D-III)Scituate (2-6 D-IV)Smithfield (4-4 D-IV)Tiverton (3-5 D-IV)Toll Gate (1-6 D-IIIA)
This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: RIIL needs to create a level playing field for divisional realignment
