VirtuallyVarsity
2026 Division I · real numbers, no math degree required

RPI, Explained

RPI — the Rating Percentage Index — is how college lacrosse answers an old playground argument: “sure, you won more games… but who did you play?” Here's how it works, using real results from the 2026 MCLA season.

Why not just count wins?

Because schedules aren't equal. A team can go 12–2 feasting on struggling programs while another goes 9–5 against a gauntlet of ranked opponents. If you only look at win percentage, the first team looks better. Anyone who watched both seasons knows it isn't that simple.

RPI fixes this with one idea: your rating should mostly depend on the company you keep. It blends three questions into a single number between 0 and 1:

25%Did you win?
50%Did your opponents win?
25%Did their opponents win?

Yes — only a quarter of your RPI is your own record. Half of it is how good your opponents were, and the last quarter is how good their opponents were. Win percentage measures how often you won; RPI measures how impressive it was.

Three rings of evidence

Picture your season as three rings. You're in the middle. Around you: every team you played. Around them: every team they played. RPI looks at all three rings — and the middle ring counts double.

YOU 25% YOUR OPPONENTS 50% THEIR OPPONENTS 25%

Quick vocabulary, since you'll see these on the ratings page: your own winning percentage is WP, your opponents' winning percentage is OWP, and their opponents' is OOWP. RPI = .25×WP + .50×OWP + .25×OOWP. That's the whole formula.

A real 2026 example: Virginia Tech vs Brigham Young

Brigham Young finished 20–1 — a better record than Virginia Tech at 16–2. So why is Virginia Tech #1 in RPI? Look at the purple bars: Virginia Tech's opponents won 65.2% of their games, Brigham Young's won 59.8%. Virginia Tech simply played a harder schedule — and the formula weighs that twice as much as your own record.

Virginia Tech logo
Virginia Tech
16–2 · ranked #1
Your wins ×.25 0.8889
Opponents' wins ×.50 0.6523
Their opponents' wins ×.25 0.5627
RPI 0.6891
Fewer wins, tougher road — #1.
Brigham Young logo
Brigham Young
20–1 · ranked #2
Your wins ×.25 0.9524
Opponents' wins ×.50 0.5981
Their opponents' wins ×.25 0.5475
RPI 0.6740
More wins, softer schedule — #2.

Each bar is one ingredient; multiply by its weight (.25 / .50 / .25), add them up, and you get the RPI shown at the bottom of each card.

How far can a schedule carry you?

This is the part that surprises people. In 2026, Pittsburgh went 9–3 (winning 75.0% of their games) while Central Florida went 4–7 (just 36.4%). And yet Central Florida sits above Pittsburgh in RPI — #26 to #27.

Central Florida logo
Central Florida
4–7 · ranked #26
Your wins ×.25 0.3636
Opponents' wins ×.50 0.5710
Their opponents' wins ×.25 0.5564
RPI 0.5155
A losing record — against monsters.
Pittsburgh logo
Pittsburgh
9–3 · ranked #27
Your wins ×.25 0.7500
Opponents' wins ×.50 0.4318
Their opponents' wins ×.25 0.4450
RPI 0.5146
A winning record — against a lighter slate.

Is that fair? It's the formula working as designed: a .500-ish season against great teams tells you more than a strong record against weak ones. (It's also why coaches schedule up.)

The fairness trick: beating a team can't hurt you

One clever wrinkle. When the formula measures how good your opponents are, it removes the games they played against you. Real 2026 case: Utah Valley beat Brigham Young, and Brigham Young's only loss all season was that game. So when Brigham Young shows up in Utah Valley's schedule-strength math, the head-to-head games vanish:

20–1
Brigham Young's real record
→
20–1 20–0
what Utah Valley's RPI sees
→
1.0000
a perfect opponent

Why bother? Without this, beating a good team would drag down their record — and therefore your schedule strength. You'd be punished for winning. With the exclusion, knocking off a giant only ever helps you.

Every team, one picture

Here's the whole 2026 Division I field. Each dot is a team: the further right, the more they won; the higher up, the better their RPI. If win percentage were the whole story, the dots would form a perfect diagonal line. The vertical scatter is strength of schedule.

0%25%50%75%100%0.250.300.350.400.450.500.550.600.650.70 WIN % (HOW MUCH YOU WON) RPI (HOW GOOD YOUR SEASON WAS) Utah Valley — 17–2, RPI 0.6572Florida State — 16–3, RPI 0.6511South Carolina — 11–5, RPI 0.6361Arizona — 13–2, RPI 0.6211Tennessee — 14–5, RPI 0.6161Georgia — 10–5, RPI 0.6123UC Santa Barbara — 11–3, RPI 0.5945Clemson — 11–5, RPI 0.5919San Diego State — 12–5, RPI 0.5912Texas — 10–5, RPI 0.5751Northeastern — 7–5, RPI 0.5724Boston College — 11–3, RPI 0.5711Liberty — 7–7, RPI 0.5605California — 11–5, RPI 0.5536Chapman — 8–7, RPI 0.5426Auburn — 8–7, RPI 0.5389Michigan State — 7–5, RPI 0.5364Texas Christian — 8–5, RPI 0.5335Arizona State — 5–8, RPI 0.5319Colorado State — 7–10, RPI 0.5278Colorado — 7–10, RPI 0.5264Florida — 6–5, RPI 0.5249Sonoma State University — 8–5, RPI 0.5175Texas A&M — 6–6, RPI 0.5109Minnesota — 6–6, RPI 0.5087Cal Poly — 7–7, RPI 0.5072Southern Methodist University — 9–6, RPI 0.5050West Virginia — 6–7, RPI 0.5009Grand Canyon — 4–6, RPI 0.4953Oregon — 12–4, RPI 0.4951Georgia Tech — 4–7, RPI 0.4944Kansas — 7–1, RPI 0.4880Utah — 4–7, RPI 0.4871James Madison — 5–6, RPI 0.4869Alabama — 4–5, RPI 0.4804Miami (Ohio) — 5–4, RPI 0.4640Simon Fraser — 6–4, RPI 0.4620Connecticut — 4–8, RPI 0.4429Boise State — 4–9, RPI 0.4409New Hampshire — 4–7, RPI 0.4397USC — 5–8, RPI 0.4394Purdue — 5–7, RPI 0.4391North Carolina — 3–6, RPI 0.4384Missouri — 8–3, RPI 0.4319NC State — 2–8, RPI 0.4302Kentucky — 2–9, RPI 0.4198Santa Clara — 4–9, RPI 0.4117Louisiana State University — 4–6, RPI 0.4094Indiana — 5–5, RPI 0.4056Utah Tech — 4–8, RPI 0.4034Iowa State — 3–6, RPI 0.4024UCLA — 1–10, RPI 0.3993Nevada — 1–10, RPI 0.3969Oklahoma — 2–9, RPI 0.3949Ole Miss — 1–8, RPI 0.3831Buffalo — 3–5, RPI 0.3777Jacksonville University — 0–7, RPI 0.3761Stanford — 1–8, RPI 0.3759Temple — 3–6, RPI 0.3740Baylor — 0–11, RPI 0.3561Oregon State — 2–8, RPI 0.3531Western Michigan — 2–8, RPI 0.3373Syracuse — 0–9, RPI 0.3127Washington — 2–8, RPI 0.3080Illinois — 0–9, RPI 0.3012Washington State — 0–8, RPI 0.2645 Virginia Tech 16–2 · RPI 0.6891 Brigham Young 20–1 · RPI 0.6740 Pittsburgh 9–3 · RPI 0.5146 Central Florida 4–7 · RPI 0.5155

Teams at the same height won very different shares of their games — the formula sees their seasons as equally impressive. Hover any dot for the team.

The fine print (kept short)

Only Division I vs Division I games feed the Division I ratings — cross-division games and non-MCLA opponents don't count either way. Scrimmages are excluded. A tie counts as half a win. And SOS (strength of schedule), the cyan number on the ratings page, is just the opponent part of the formula on its own: (2×OWP + OOWP) ÷ 3.

Want to check the math on any team? Every row on the ratings page expands into its full schedule — every counted game, the two numbers it contributes, and the excluded games grayed out.

Open the RPI ratings →