Rule 3: All St John's games are either gimmes, must wins, or must win gimmes.
If this is considered a road game it is worth as much in the RPI as a home win over Duke. SJU has to win one of the games this week or they will have dig a very deep hole and are likely out of NCAA tournament contention.
If that's true we should schedule lots of road games in the preseason versus bad teams. But I don't know if it is. According to the NCAA RPI Is calculated using three factors:
FACTOR 1- Division I Winning Percentage: Take the team’s won-lost percentage against Division I
opponents only.
FACTOR 2. Strength of Schedule: Take each opponent’s won-lost percentage against other Division I
teams and then average these percentages.
FACTOR 3. Opponents’ Strength of Schedule: The strength of each opponent’s schedule is measured by
using the same formula from Factor 2 for each opponent, then averaging these percentages.
https://www.ncaa.org/sites/default/files/FAQ_for_MLAX_RPI.pdfNothing about home and away in there. Maybe there's some further calculation but the NCAA doesn't mention it. And anyway "The RPI is just one of many factors used by the committee."
And another anyway, teams are rarely out of NCAA tournament contention the first week of December.