Part of this is bragging and part of this is being a bit curious.  To be clear, yes I'm bragging about our conference.

Our conference got off to a terrific start with 11 wins the first night of the season and mostly kept pace the remaining 9 nights.  We finished non-conference play with a record of 101-19.

Rank	Team	Prestige	Coach	Conference	Record	SOS	SOS Rank	RPI
1	Thomas	A+	kujayhawk	N.Atlantic	9-1	0.693	1	0.757
4	Maine, Presque Isle	C	matt58vt	N.Atlantic	8-2	0.667	3	0.724
5	Johnson St.	C-	bieberfever	N.Atlantic	10-0	0.622	19	0.716
6	Husson	B+	tianyi7886	N.Atlantic	9-1	0.602	26	0.69
8	Castleton St.	A+	rdb03161987	N.Atlantic	9-1	0.591	38	0.682
12	Salem St.	C-	luckystar	N.Atlantic	10-0	0.552	79	0.664
16	Lasell	A-	carlbuzz	N.Atlantic	8-2	0.602	27	0.661
24	Mount Ida	A	mizzou77	N.Atlantic	6-4	0.615	20	0.642
52	Becker	A-	nz00	N.Atlantic	7-3	0.561	67	0.596
117	Maine Maritime Academy	B-	jazzcog	N.Atlantic	10-0	0.393	373	0.545
142	Maine, Farmington	C-	teamkf	N.Atlantic	9-1	0.412	360	0.527
155	Elms	C+	tyber90	N.Atlantic	6-4	0.453	287	0.521

I knew that the Southern California in Knight currently holds the D3 RPI record and by such a margin that they created a thread to (deservedly) brag about it.  I took the time yesterday to try and compare what they had done at time of conference tourney with where we stood.  Based on what is in that thread, it looks like they went 100-20 in non-conference play.

So I'm wondering if we set a new record.  Maybe not because it might be possible to exceed 100 wins and not rival the SoCal's RPI mark if the non-conference schedule was extremely poor across the board and teams flamed out in the NT.  But I'm guessing that 100 was the old bar and our conference just barely got over it.

Anybody know?  If not, this turns into the bragging part of the post.

By the way, it's silly that WIS doesn't automatically keep track of these kind of things.

That's VERY impressive. I doubt that's been topped. Congrats!

I thought we had 18 losses that season in non-con, but it's entirely possible that it was 20

edit: i just went back and looked and we did lose 20 games in non con, 11 of which were by 2 teams.  the other 10 teams lost 9 games between them.  the 6 teams in the South went 57-3 in non-con play that season...but it does in fact appear that as a conference you did lose fewer games.  will be interesting to see how your RPI turns out!

I shoulda stayed at UMPI another year...

I do believe it breaks down to 32-18 against other human coached teams (69-1 against sims).  Which actually isn't that bad. 
Castleton bucked the trend and went 8-1 against non-sims.

I can be as guilty as the next, but it just shows how schedules can be manipulated to achieve gaudy numbers. 

Posted by Iguana1 on 8/30/2011 7:14:00 PM (view original):
I do believe it breaks down to 32-18 against other human coached teams (69-1 against sims).  Which actually isn't that bad. 
Castleton bucked the trend and went 8-1 against non-sims.

I can be as guilty as the next, but it just shows how schedules can be manipulated to achieve gaudy numbers. 

I feel like our conf rpi wouldn't hold up, because the Sims we played probably won't win their conf games against human teams, most won't make the NT, and these two factors will hurt alot. 

If you scheduled the right sims they should win a ton of conference games...

Posted by Iguana1 on 8/30/2011 7:14:00 PM (view original):
I do believe it breaks down to 32-18 against other human coached teams (69-1 against sims).  Which actually isn't that bad. 
Castleton bucked the trend and went 8-1 against non-sims.

I can be as guilty as the next, but it just shows how schedules can be manipulated to achieve gaudy numbers. 

Not going to really disagree with this, Iguana.  But I will point out a couple of things.  (And I fully know that you know this, but for others ...)

1)  For the teams in our conference it was about 50-50 in scheduling sims that can compete versus those than cannot.  At the extreme, UMF and MMA scheduled a bunch of patsies (other than the one human team UMF played and lost).  At the other, Dac and I scheduled a few sim teams but I currently have the #1 SOS and UMPI is #3.  I'm not saying there isn't a bit of manipulation in that but our conference SOS is #1 at .5642 and that's #1 in D3 and in all three Allen worlds.

For what it's worth, there are also "only" 116 human teams and we have 12 of them.  This will probably change as the season progresses, but of the top 100 RPI teams that aren't in our conference, 53 are human and 38 are sim.

2)  To the extent that we are manipulating things (and I can't fully speak for everybody but our message board has somewhat articulated this in addition to me), I think it is being done for purposes of making it to the NT and getting the necessary wins to do so, not to post a gaudy number.  MMA took things to a real extreme and I don't think it was necessary since they are plenty good enough to get there and are in this season's weaker division.  But last season MMA had a team that was borderline NT worthy and got crushed in conference play and Elms had a team that was definitely good enough for the NT but schedule a bunch of elite teams and went 1-9 against them (with a crazy number of one bucket losses) and couldn't recover from that terrible start.

Pretending these teams weren't all in the same conference, I'd say we have the following rosters in terms of quality (ignoring RPI/SOS):

1-2 NT Seed: Castleton
2-5 NT Seed: Husson, Lasell
3-6 NT Seed: MMA, UMPI
4-8 NT Seed: Thomas
7-11 NT Seed: Johnson State
10 NT Seed - Bubble: Becker, Mount Ida, Salem State

This probably isn't going to happen and my rankings probably aren't 100% accurate.  But to take Becker as an extreme example, they will be an underdog in 11 conference games and a pick 'em in 2 others.  If that form holds, Becker is missing out on the NT because with "only" 7 non-conference wins, they aren't getting the 14 they need to make the tourney.

Salem State, meanwhile, is in the exact same situation but since they went 10-0 in non-conference, they would get exactly the 14 wins one needs.  I think they are probably our worst team that is still NT caliber but those 10 wins will go a long way to making sure they make the cut.

Mount Ida is likely to have the best team by season's end, perhaps even better than Johnson State, but I'm not sure they will be able to "recover" from a 6-4 non-conference start to get the wins necessary to make it to NT.

I know as it pertains to me, I was well aware that there are no easy nights in conference play when it came time to forming my non-conference schedule.  Prior to our conference being full of quality human teams, I scheduled one of the toughest slates in D3 year in, year out.  But now, I want to be aware of my pecking order before sticking my neck out a bit too far.  There is going to be more than one really good team in our conference that goes 7-9 or worse and if it is me I want to have that cushion so that I'm not a #1 seed in the PIT.

its all about scheduling the right sims... I did a pretty good job this time around I guess (and matt's done his part TCOB)