Interesting read on the AAC by Baseball America through this past week:
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Tough Going in the American Athletic Conference (should be free):
Save for East Carolina, which has earned its place in the top 10 with a 17-5 record, the first six weeks of the season have not been particularly kind to the American Athletic Conference.
Just two teams, East Carolina and Wichita State, are more than one game above .500 as the league enters conference play this weekend, and some of the presumed contenders for the conference crown alongside the Pirates haven’t played the part so far.
Central Florida came into the season ranked and won a series at Mississippi, a top-five team in the country and the No. 1 team at the time, but it has also lost three series already this season, including getting swept at home by Liberty.
Tulane came just a couple of plays away from winning a series against Mississippi State the same weekend UCF took down Ole Miss, but it has won just two of its six series overall.
There is still much baseball to be played, but it’s not too early to begin wondering about the possibility that the conference is a one-bid league. That might seem unfathomable given the strength of the league, but the numbers currently aren’t in its favor.
It’s still a touch early to fixate on RPI too much, and because there has been much less cross-conference competition this season, there is a debate to be had about how useful the metric is this season anyway, but it can give us a high-level view of where things stand.
From a conference perspective, the American is currently seventh in conference RPI, a handful of spots behind where it typically is. And while there is still time to improve its standing, it will have to do so without the benefit of impact nonconference games, as the AAC just finished its entire slate of midweek games for the season on Tuesday. On its face, all of that is bad news for postseason hopes, but let’s look for comparisons with recent seventh-place leagues, just in the event that ranking sticks.
In three of the last four seasons, the seventh-ranked RPI conference was the Big Ten. In 2016, that resulted in three teams in the field, with the other two seasons (2017 and 2019) resulting in five, although it would have been four both times had it not been for Iowa and Ohio State, respectively, stealing bids as conference tournament champs.
That should be taken as good news for the AAC’s prospects because it shows a willingness by the committee to put that many teams in from a conference that isn't in the top five in RPI. But that’s a tricky comparison because there are caveats galore.
For one, as a league with just eight members, the AAC isn’t getting five teams into the field even in its best season. By percentage, five Big Ten teams into the field is roughly the equivalent of three in the AAC.
Second, it’s important to note that there can be differences in the reasons why a league is seventh in RPI.
In the Big Ten’s case, it typically has a couple of teams with RPIs above 200 and at least a couple of others nearing that range, which serve as anchors on the collective RPI. The RPI settles where it does, though, because the Big Ten counteracts that with at least five or six teams that are in the top 75 or so.
In the case of this year’s AAC, meanwhile, it ranks seventh in RPI not because it has multiple teams dragging it down and just as many propping it up, but because everyone except ECU is somewhere in the middle. After Tuesday’s games, every team but ECU was packed in somewhere between 87 and 186 in the metric.
So perhaps the case of 2018’s seventh-ranked RPI conference is a better comparison. That was the ASUN, which got two teams into the field, including a host in Stetson. That season, Stetson emerged as a host candidate as it put together a gaudy overall record.
Jacksonville got in as a second team by simply taking care of business against every team other than Stetson in the ASUN, finishing second in the conference and coasting in on the RPI high tide created by the Hatters.
It’s very easy to see the AAC recreating that scenario, with ECU playing the role of Stetson and a team like UCF playing the role of Jacksonville, with the early-season series win over Ole Miss serving as something that really puts the Knights over the top.
The best news of all for the AAC, though, might be that traditional metrics like RPI won’t be as effective a tool this season, leaving the committee to lean on things like perception of the strength of a conference, the eye test and regional advisory committees to fill in gaps. Someone is going to finish second in the AAC, and there’s a good chance that the team that does will do so with an impressive league record. And maybe that will be enough to get a team from a traditionally strong conference into the field.
But that just serves to illustrate the hole that the conference is already in, because it’s not in a place where we can project teams to make the field of 64 based on results we’ve seen thus far, but rather, we’re looking for teams that fit the bill of being able to take advantage of the strength of the best team in the conference in order to prop up an otherwise mediocre resume. <-
