Questions

• Who are you (you biased SOB!)?
• Why do you do this?
• How did you get started?
• Are you nuts? This seems like a lot of work!
• Do you update the ratings during the tournament?
• Can you send me the data in a different format?
• When did you start tracking football too?
• When are you going to track other sports (Baseball, Soccer, Curling, etc)?
• How do you make money at this?
• Why don't you get a real job?
• Has the site won any awards or ever been reviewed?
• Can we do a link exchange?

Answers

Brief Bio: My name is Jerry Palm. I'm a 1985 graduate of Purdue University, where I majored in Computer Science. I'm having a bad hair life.

As for my biases, obviously I'm a Purdue fan. I had season basketball tickets for 18 years. I root for the Big Ten (except Indiana, of course) in the NCAA Tournament. However, none of that has anything to do with the ratings or the bracket analysis. The ratings are based on a formula which I did not create. I do the best I can to filter out my biases about teams and conferences when doing bracket analysis. I'm trying to read the collective mind of a ten-person committee and they don't care who I like, so my biases aren't useful in that process.

I've always been a hoops junkie and a stats geek. I had more room in my head for batting averages than Shakespeare as a kid. I always wanted a career in sports, especially sports journalism. I did some newspaper and radio stuff in high school, but I discovered early on that there was a lot more money in computers and that I was better at that anyway. Publishing this page satisfies all those urges in a way that wasn't possible as little as 10 years ago.

I saw an article in a magazine about a change in the RPI fourmula during the 1994 season and it looked pretty simple. My local paper did not print the RPI very often and when they did, they usually printed only the top 25-50 teams. I didn't consider that enough information. So I created a database and some programs to duplicate it myself. This wasn't too tough for a person with my skill set.

I had the idea that other people like myself might want this information too, so I started posting it on the college basketball news group. I was right. People started sending me e-mail asking for me to send them the RPI daily in e-mail. That was too much work, so I created a web page for it.

Since then, I have had to move it almost every year because either it grew in popularity beyond what my provider could handle, or I wanted to add new fuctionality that my provider did not allow. In 1998, it got its own domain - CollegeRPI.com - so that if I had to move it, at least I didn't have to change the URL. In 1999, I went through three providers, so it's a good thing it had its own name. The 2000-2001 season is the first in which I didn't have to change providers mid-season.

The site has never been advertised. It's growth is attributed solely to word-of-mouth and search engine accesses. Some of the mouths the words have come from have been in the media (newspapers and radio), which has helped the growth tremendously. I did about 30 radio interviews the last week of the 2000 season.

The site averaged over 1,000,000 hits/week over the last six weeks of the 2000-2001 regular season. I've pretty much stopped counting since then.

The pre-season set up can be time consuming, but once the season is under way, I only spend 15-30 minutes a day on it, depending on how busy the schedule was the night before. Bracket projections take a few hours. Writing takes as long as it takes to think of something and then type it.

No. The purpose of the RPI is to be an aid in selecting the teams that get in the tournament. Once the tournament starts, the RPI becomes irrelevant.

No, sorry. I don't send out the RPI or any of the supporting information in any other format. I also don't make available the programs or database setup. Feel free to download or print what you can off the pages, but I generally don't have time for special requests.

When the BCS was created in 1998. The strength of schedule piece was much like the RPI's, so it was easy for me to follow. In 1999, I started posting the BCS, schedules, results and standings on CollegeBCS.com.

Now that I've started tracking women's basketball (beginning with the 1999-2000 season), I'm covering as many sports as I can reasonably handle.

An approximation of the baseball RPI can be found at http://boydsworld.home.mindspring.com/baseball/rpi

You don't make much money on the internet these days unless you have a sex site. (Hey, there's a thought! "Power Forwards of the Big Ten!" Uh, never mind.)

This site makes money through subscriptions and advertising. For more information on how to subscribe, see the front page of the site.

Believe it or not, this is my real job, although I do some computer consulting on the side.

The site has had one review that I'm aware of. Emmett Prosser of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, who (among his other duties) reveiws sports-related web sites, gave it a 4.5 rating (out of 5) in February 1999.

In November, 1999, Dave Caldwell of the Dallas Morning News called me "a god." I guess that was a good review too.

You are welcome to link to my site if you wish, but I don't participate in link exchanges. I get so many requests that the upkeep would be too much for me. Sorry.