A little over a year ago at the NCAA convention, a proposal to make all of the NCAA’s data public was defeated. Enough peer pressure was put on and, in our opinion, misinformation spread, that the proposal was eventually withdrawn.
A compromise, it was said, would be to make public the data in a handful of sports, through posting PDF files, rather than issuing each school a login to a system that already exists for members of regional ranking committees to use.
We know full well the embarrassment of incorrect data and how D3sports.com people must now check every sport’s championship handbook on its release to make sure that the right number of Pool B and Pool C teams are being awarded. This year, in fact, the women’s basketball committee again had to revise their handbook, having promised twice as many Pool B bids as the numbers actually provided for.
So while they won’t open all of their data, they have opened women’s basketball up for us to look at. We always figure the more eyes on data, the better. That’s why our data has always been open and public, and corrections come in throughout the season. That’s because our system, like the NCAA’s, is reliant on schools entering schedules and results, and sometimes typos occur, or sometimes schools just don’t understand what defines a regional game.
At the bottom of this week’s women’s basketball release on the NCAA Web site there are links to PDF files for each of the eight regions which contain the numbers for each team. What we’re concerned with is the first number: the regional win-loss record. That’s the basis for every other number when calculating strength of schedule.
Compare those numbers to the regional record listed with our strength of schedule numbers. This file is currently through the same day, Sunday, Feb. 7. While we continually audit our own database to make sure no errors occur, we have not been able to audit theirs until now.