General Notes on
NCAA Regional Results

The notation under "NCAA Result" shows the sequence of Wins and Losses for each team. At the end of the tournament, the teams are shown in their order of finish.

W-L-T Record is from the NCAA, and covers all games before regional play. Similarly, the standings in the polls and most of the other ranking criteria (described separately below) are from the Monday when the regional pairings and seedings were announced. [CB denotes Collegiate Baseball, BA denotes Baseball America.]

I use "champ" to denote the automatic qualifier from a conference and "runner up" is the loser in the conference tournament final. [The SEC awards its championship to the top team in the regular season but its automatic bid goes to the tournament winner. The regular season champ, and hence official SEC champion, is noted in the parenthetical remarks. Also note that those rankings are the SEC tournament seeds; for example, in 1999 E#1 South Carolina got the #2 seed even though they had the 7th best record.]

Many thanks to Rick Rollins for the conference standings that make possible my "etc..." column with conference finishing information and my separate analysis of performance grouped by conference, as well as Boyd's independent ranking information.

A continuing feature is a set of rankings produced by Boyd Nation from the comprehensive season results kept by Rick Rollins. (The RPI and ISR always include results of conference tournament games.) There are two of these:

• The pseudo-RPI ranking (so named because the formula used here is only a guess at the most basic component of the "Ratings Power Index" formula that the NCAA uses and keeps secret) is in the RPI column. A low ranking is good. Note that two teams separated by a few places in the ranking might have pseudo-RPIs that differ only in the 3rd or 4th digit.

• Boyd's computerized strengths, rounded to an integer, are in the ISR (Iterative Strength Ratings) column. A high rating is good. The value in the table indicates the strength of a team relative to an average value of 100. The larger the difference between two ratings, the greater the chance of the higher-ranked team winning.

A third, denoted by PP, is no longer included (effective 2001) but appears in some of the previous regional analyses:

• Boyd's Pythagorean Projection is given in the PP column. These may or may not include conference tournament games depending on when he evaluated it for a particular year. A postive number in the Pythagorean Projection is a "lucky" team that has won that many more games than their for/against run count would predict.