Everyone’s talking about the NET in college basketball this season and they’re not referring to the braided nylon and cotton threads on the rim. They’re talking about the new rating metric that will be used to judge the overall strength of teams as the season slowly creeps closer to March.
So what is it?
Well the NCAA Evaluation Tool, or “NET” for short, is set to replace the RPI as the primary source tool for evaluating teams during the Division I men’s basketball season according to the NCAA’s website.
“The NET was built to create a ranking system that was as accurate as possible while also evaluating team performance fairly,” the NCAA mentions on their site.
It was approved in late July 2018 by a bevy of Division I committees, coaches associations, experts on basketball analytics and even Google Cloud service professionals.
What’s the big deal?
As it stands there are currently 353 teams in men’s Division I Basketball that are all fighting for one of the 68 spots that the NCAA Tournament’s current format allows.
With that note out of the way, let’s dive into a unique perspective of NET.
There are not a lot of spots up for grabs and there are cases every year where teams in danger of not making the field of 68 have their prospective “resumes” brought before the tournament selection committee to be dissected.
These resumes are referred to as “team sheets” by the committee and according to David Worlock, the Director of Media Coordination and Statistics at the NCAA, they serve as a “visual snapshot” of a team’s resume.
These team sheets are visually color-coded and highlighted to show a team’s current position over the course of a season while also encompassing every metric that the committee uses.
So what stats are they looking at to produce the sheets and how do they fit in with the NET ratings?
A key metric calculated into the team sheet is the “Quadrant System” that was introduced before last season, which serves to place more emphasis on rewarding the success of a team for games they play away from their home arena.
There are currently four quadrants and your opponent’s perceived strength and location of the game’s venue are indicative as to which quadrant category you will be credited for if you win against them.
Now on the NET side of it, here are the main categories of statistical significance that are factored in: Game Results, Strength of Schedule, Game Location, Scoring Margin, Net Offensive and Defensive Efficiency, and the Quality of Wins and Losses.
This being the first year of the NET, there are also some interesting components that must be noted first in terms of its calculation. For instance, you can only be credited for winning up to a margin of 10 points. Beating a team by 12 points would be weighted exactly the same as say beating them by 35 points instead.
The date of when the game happened is also thrown out as well and every game of your season is weighted equally. By doing this it takes away a lot of the subjectivity of things like the “eye-ball test” and also eliminates human inferences that can’t be noted on a stat sheet, like a team getting more comfortable with their play or the momentum of a season.
Does that mean that the fate of a team’s season now rests solely on the NET?
Not exactly. As Dan Gavitt, the senior vice president of basketball for the NCAA notes, “The committee won’t solely focus on metrics to select at-large teams and seed the field. There will always be a subjective element to the tournament selection process too.”
Coupled with this new measurement tool and the previous simulations that the NCAA has conducted on past seasons to gauge its effectiveness, it should be pretty interesting to see just who gets the chance to punch their ticket to the big dance this season.