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It’s all about the Big West atop the season’s first RPI rankings.
Three Big West schools – Long Beach State, Hawai’i and UC Irvine – all finished in the top three of the RPI that the NCAA released on Monday.
A team’s RPI ranking is calculated using a mathematical formula that includes its winning percentage, strength of schedule and opponents’ strength of schedule. RPI also is one of the criteria categories the selection committee uses to determine the NCAA Tournament field.
Long Beach State earned the top spot in the RPI with almost a two-hundredths percentage point edge ahead of second-place Hawai’i. The Beach is the only undefeated team in NCAA Division I-II men’s volleyball and entered last weekend in the nation’s top 15 for strength of schedule.
Hawai’i edged out third-place UC Irvine by more than one-hundredth of a percentage in the rankings.
McKendree was the top non-Big West school in the rankings at No. 4. This is the highest RPI rankings for the Bearcats in their program history.
The defending NCAA champions UCLA round out the top five of the RPI rankings.
An updated RPI rankings will be released each Monday throughout the regular season and conference tournaments. The final RPI rankings before the nine-team NCAA Tournament will be unveiled on Selection Sunday.
RPI rankings (March 17)
1. Long Beach State
2. Hawai’i
3. UC Irvine
4. McKendree
5. UCLA
6. Loyola
7. USC
8. BYU
9. CSUN
10. Pepperdine
11. Grand Canyon
12. UC San Diego
13. Ohio State
14. Ball State
15. Lincoln Memorial
16. Mount Olive
17. Stanford
18. Lewis
19. Princeton
20. Lindenwood
21. UC Santa Barbara
22. George Mason
23. Belmont Abbey
24. St. Thomas Aquinas
25. Penn State
26. Purdue Fort Wayne
27. Queens
28. Harvard
29. Concordia
30. Vanguard
31. Long Island
32. NJIT
33. Fort Valley State
34. Maryville
35. Daemen
36. Tusculum
37. Charleston
38. Catawba
39. Saint Francis
40. Missouri S&T
41. Barton
42. Sacred Heart
43. Quincy
44. Merrimack
45. Rockhurst
46. North Greenville
47. Barry
48. Fairleigh Dickinson
49. Dominican
50. Menlo
51. D’Youville
52. Edward Waters
53. Thomas More
54. Erskine
55. King
56. Roberts Wesleyan
57. Emmanuel
58. Lees-McRae
59. Central State
60. Roosevelt
61. Benedict
62. American International
63. Jessup
64. UC Merced
65. Morehouse
66. LeMoyne-Owen
67. Kentucky State