OUA using RPI to solve its ‘Ottawa problem’ in basketball

Well, it is university and everyone should be able to do math.

Any basketball junkie needs little introduction to RPI, or Ratings Percentage Index, the sometimes controversial metric used to "aid in the selecting and seeding of teams appearing" in March Madness. Ontario University Athletics, of course, now has a math problem, since 17 teams leaves it with a prime number. as always with university sport in Canada, there's an economic problem: no money and seemingly no way to attract that casual sports fan dollar, even with six Sportsnet feeds and soon-to-be five TSNs. Thirdly, after a season where city rivals Carleton and Ottawa met in the CIS men's gold-medal game while their division rival from Ryerson stayed home even though it was a Top 5 team, it has the problem that its two-division alignment might have been keeping it from sending its best teams to the Final 8.

Hence a move that probably seems convoluted in theory, to think nothing of application. The OUA, in addition to going to a four-division format in a cost-saving move, is also going to use a modified version of RPI to determine its playoff matchups.

The gist of the conference's release:

The four-division alignment is as follows:

Central — Brock Badgers, Guelph Gryphons, Lakehead Thunderwolves, McMaster Marauders;

East — Queen’s Golden Gaels, Ryerson Rams, Toronto Varsity Blues, York Lions;

North — Carleton Ravens, Laurentian Voyageurs, Nipissing Lakers, Ottawa Gee-Gees;

West — Algoma Thunderbirds, Laurier Golden Hawks, Waterloo Warriors, Western Mustangs, Windsor Lancers.

There are plus and minuses. It's not quick and easy for the casual fan. A student or alumnus is probably more interested in finding out who her/his school is facing than in the formula that was used to determine the matchups, except at the University of Waterloo. (Had to go there, eh?) Instead of facing a bitter rival in a first-round game, a team could face an opponent that hasn't been to its gym all season.

It's also a modified version of RPI since only the results against playoff teams will count, but tossing out the results against a team that goes 2-17 or 2-18 might not be so bad.

(That's another thing. Since it has one more team, the West division teams play 20 conference games instead of 19. Only in Canada, but that's meant as a compliment. The highest-seeded team will also host the OUA Final Four, instead of it being at a predetermined site.)

Concomitantly, though, this does drive at acknowledging and adapting to the gap between upper-echelon usual suspects that play near a NCAA Division I level — Dave Smart's Ravens, their fast-breaking foils under James Derouin in Ottawa and Roy Rana's Ryerson Rams, and on through to top teams at McMaster and Windsor — and the rest of the pack. The same is true for the women's teams trying to catch up to Chantal Vallée's Windsor Lancers, who have won four consecutive national titles and played in the past five championship games.

Point being, this is a step forward. The old OUA East/OUA West format essentially meant only two teams from one division for the Final 8. It's hard to ignore how that created unnecessary challenges for growing the game and helping OUA basketball achieve a modicum of relevancy. The Greater Toronto Area is hotbed of hoops in this country. Ryerson is doing very well at tapping into that by hosting Canadian national team games, staging the OUA Final Four men's tourney and landing the host bid for 2015 CIS Final 8. The stumbling block is that, competitively, the Rams couldn't get into the past two Final Fours after playoff losses to Ottawa. The lack of a GTA presence hurt attendance. Employing RPI to seed the playoffs might not address all the issues fully, but it creates some flexibility in a very fluid basketball ecosystem.

Neate Sager is a writer for Yahoo! Canada Sports. Follow him on Twitter @neatebuzzthenet.