02/01/21 – Initial Basketball RPI Rankings Available

February 1, 2021 2020-2021 News Releases

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: February 1, 2021

The first official KHSAA Ratings Percentage Index (RPI) Rankings of the 2020-21 basketball season are now available on the Association’s website (https://khsaa.org/rpi-ratings-percentage-index/).

The RPI is a tool developed for all team sports by using the official KHSAA/Riherds Scoreboard data. It is provided for a variety of reasons including district tiebreaking and football bracketing, and as a means to increase publicity, interest and promotion. The Board of Control has approved the RPI to be used as a tiebreaking/contest result mechanism to decide seeded district games not played by the deadline.

The RPI rankings are updated on an hourly basis, but are not calculated for teams with missing scores from the previous day or earlier. For the 2020-21 basketball season, COVID cancellations are marked on a team’s schedule as a 0-0 tie but are not factored into the RPI calculations and rankings.

RPI measures a team’s strength relative to other teams, based largely on the strength of their schedules (margin of victory is not a factor). RPI is calculated from the team’s Winning Percentage (WP), the Opponent’s Winning Percentage (OWP) and the Opponents’ Opponents’ Winning Percentage (OOWP). These three components are combined to produce the RPI using the following formula: RPI = (WP * WPVAL) + (OWP * OWPVAL) + (OOWP * OOWPVAL).

The KHSAA has adopted its RPI using the following final calculation:

• WPVAL shall be .35 (or 35 percent)
• OWPVAL shall be .35 (or 35 percent)
• OOWPVAL shall be .30 (or 30 percent)

All out-of-state opponents will be handled in the following manner:

• All out of state teams will be assigned a .500 WP for all calculations. Were this not the case, schools would be chasing tens of thousands of opponents of out-of-state opponents over the course of a season, and there is no way to ensure the accuracy of that data.
• The .500 figure was selected because it is the average value of opponents’ opponents winning percentages across all sports.
• This same value of .5 is also assigned to any in-state home school competing against a member school.

– KHSAA –

About the Kentucky High School Athletic Association
The Kentucky High School Athletic Association was organized in 1917 and is the agency designated by the Kentucky Department of Education to manage high school athletics in the Commonwealth. The Association is a voluntary nonprofit 501(c)3 organization made up of 284 member schools both public and non-public. The KHSAA awards 215 state championships to 51 teams and 164 individuals in 13 sports and 6 sport-activities, funds catastrophic insurance coverage for its more than 106,000 rostered member school student-athletes, provides coaching education and sports safety programs for more than 12,000 coaches, and licenses and facilitates the distribution of training material for over 4,000 contest officials.