FPI is one metric that attempts to have some predictive power. There are a ton of others.

There are other resume metrics out there that mostly focus on “strength of record.”

Supposedly the committee can look at this data (although I don’t recall them citing basically any of it this year in any of the weekly interviews they did. But could be wrong), and people must be filling in a lot of blanks and saying that it’s influenced the committee in a way they disagree with.

It’s one data point, among lots of others. It’s not gospel. But it’s not worthless either.