The Virginia Cavaliers were eliminated from the ACC Tournament by Boston College late Tuesday night, and their fate is now completely out of their hands. Now, we simply await the Selection Show on Monday afternoon where we will find out if 32-18 record is enough to earn an opportunity to play more baseball.

If you ask head coach Brian O’Connor, he certainly has his mind set. After the loss, he adamantly told the media that if the committee omits UVA from the field, they are grossly underestimating the ACC. Oak points out that Virginia went 16-11 in conference play, and with two more wins, they would have won the league.

The short answer is that the Cavaliers should and likely will selected into a regional on Monday. This does not look like a bubble resume, and we have to imagine the program that has appeared in the College World Series in three of the last four years, including once as a three seed, will be given the benefit of the doubt. That said, if you are plugged into the national media, it is clear that either outcome is possible, so let’s dig into it more.

As of Saturday morning, Virginia sits at 60th in RPI, 33rd in DSR, 46th in KPI.

RPI

RPI is a simple metric used across all college sports that factors in your record, the record of your opponents, and the record of your opponents’ opponents. Since there are over 300 Division I college baseball teams, this metric is completely flawed, and should have no weight in tournament selection.

Often times, the RPI penalizes high-major teams just for playing non-conference games against opponents with losing records and a poor strength of schedule. The ‘Hoos lost RPI points from a May contest where they beat Towson 19-1. Several programs are notorious for finding a reason to cancel these types of games for that sole reason.

Nobody in their right minds can tell me that this is a metric that provides any sort of value when evaluating resumes. Quite frankly, UVA’s poor RPI is the only reason we are having this conversation in the first place.

DSR

Diamond Sports Ranking takes a completely different approach to ranking college baseball (and softball) teams. Instead of weighing strength of schedule purely by records, they use Pythagorean winning percentage (a function of margins of victory and defeat) to give a more accurate estimation of the “quality” of wins and losses. Most importantly, a team cannot be penalized for a win.

Think about it. For a competitive high-major program, the difference between playing and blowing out the 200th as opposed 300th best team should be negligible. Virginia’s run-rule win over 11-25 Dartmouth and their double digit victory over 21-34 William & Mary look exactly the same in my eyes.

It is not a coincidence that a metric that more accurately accounts for that situation favors Virginia significantly more. The Cavaliers played several games against “Quad Four” opponents and did exactly as they should each time. These results should be practically ignored.

The more important factor is how they played against tournament level competition. Virginia’s top 35 DSR ranking is reflective of their 16-11 ACC record, which includes series wins over Georgia Tech and Virginia Tech, and a sweep over Miami.

KPI

Kevin Pauga Index is an up-and-coming tool that is slowly replacing the RPI as far as the committee is concerned.

Think of KPI like Wins Above Bubble in basketball. Every game result is valued from +1.0 to -1.0 based on opponent strength, location (home, neutral, or away), and of course, whether the team won or lost that contest.

KPI does not directly factor in margin of victory, albeit run differential likely factors into the algorithm used for opponent strength (the exact formula is not disclosed to the public).

This of course limits the predictive value of KPI, but I personally do not mind a results-based metric which weighs outcomes on a binary scale. Ultimately, teams play to maximize their chances of winning the game, regardless of run differential. Plus, in a sport like baseball, teams typically matchup in three game series, and there are about 50 data points in total, so no individual result holds that much weight anyways.

A 46th ranking in KPI in a nutshell has Virginia just on the right side of the bubble. Surrounding context indicates that this is clearly a tournament team.