Texas Tech softball out to solidify postseason standing in Big 12 tournament

The conversation of the Texas Tech softball team's RPI is one Gerry Glasco doesn't mind having, though he'd also like to point out a few things. The Red Raiders enter the week still a consensus top-five team in the country, ranking in the top five in numerous statistical categories (at the plate and pitching) to boot. They're the only team that has reached 50 wins to this point of the season and won the Big 12 regular-season title by five full games.

Yet the team's RPI reflects that of a middle-of-the-road team rather than one of the best. Ahead of the Big 12 Conference tournament in Oklahoma City, Texas Tech is 12th in the be-all, end-all metric that dictates much of the conversation around national seeding for the NCAA tournament. Texas Tech will find out whether it'll get to host a super regional (if it advances that far) on Sunday.

Between now and then, though, the focus is on taking down Baylor in the quarterfinals before trying to sweep its way to another tournament crown. "There's a privilege to try to repeat what we did last year," Glasco said. "It's a privilege to be here at Texas Tech and a privilege to have a team that the expectations are higher than it was a year ago.

Just shows what a tremendous privilege we have in front of us, and we just attack and we don't take anything for granted. " But RPI is something that hangs everybody's heads this time of year. While NCAA-sanctioned sports such as basketball and football have made the metric obsolete with other avenues to measure team quality, sports like softball and baseball remain beholden to the mystery number that, quite frankly, doesn't make a lot of sense.