Syracuse Lacrosse: How RPI data will affect possible future scheduling changes

Last week Lindsay Kramer wrote a nice article about Syracuse scheduling. Based on John Desko’s comments at media day, the Syracuse Orange coaching staff has been, and will continue this offseason, to look at adding and subtracting a team or two to get “a couple more tigers on the schedule,” as Desko put it. The whole point is that the Selection Committee gave SU a low eighth seed, in part due to its RPI ranking. While we can expect some sort of schedule change, these things are done years in advance, so the changes may be made for 2018 or for a year farther in the future.

I’m not going to rehash Kramer’s article, take a look at it if you get a chance, but I took the liberty of putting together some of the relevant RPI data.

SU finished the regular season lower than usual, tenth, in the RPI standings. Since the beginning of the 2010 season the Orange has only ended the regular season outside of the top four in RPI twice.

Unfortunately, Virginia finished 26^th and North Carolina finished 17^th in 2016, which hurt Syracuse’s RPI tremendously because those programs usually finish much higher (keep in mind, all RPI data in this article is taken from pre-tournament data, the same data the Selection Committee utilizes). However, there’s nothing that we can do about ACC opponents so there’s no sense in talking about them.

For the non-conference opponents here is the RPI rankings for the last seven years:

Given that history is sometimes a big part of scheduling, here is series records for each non-conference opponents against Syracuse:

We can eliminate Hobart and Johns Hopkins from the discussion because those games are not going away. The Colgate game is a nice prelude to the NCAA tournament and acts as an upstate rivalry game, so that probably stays. Albany has done well over the last few years and has helped SU’s RPI. Additionally, Albany is an easy game to schedule so we will assume that stays.

Now then, of teams left to cut out we are left with: Siena, Army, St. John’s, Cornell, and Binghamton. Army is a middle of the road RPI team so it does not hurt the Orange. Cornell stays because it is usually a good team to play in terms of RPI. The program slipped last year but other than 2016 the Big Red have been in the top 14 in RPI each of the last seven years.

Taking those teams out we are now left with: Siena, St. John’s, and Binghamton. The team with the lowest average RPI rank over the last seven years is Binghamton, closely followed by Siena which was nearly at the bottom of the RPI in each of the last two years. At least one of these three teams will be off of the schedule in the coming years.

Now just for fun, here is the RPI date over the last seven years for some potential fillers. In my mind, SU does not want to add a top ten team because there’s no reason to add a potential loss on the schedule, so the teams included are those which have been middle of the road in terms of RPIs and have been trending upwards in quality.

So let me know me know in comment section, who should SU drop and who should the program add for future scheduling?