NCAA Basketball: A look back on season one of the NET rankings
The NET didn’t make the best first impression in its debut
Perhaps that’s because it contained two WCC teams, including one very unexpected name.
When the ratings were released for the first time late last November, the reactions from basketball people were largely negative. (After those rankings came out, I wrote a piece for this site pleading for patience with the NET.) The first set of rankings listed Loyola Marymount at #10, which became a point of derision. To be fair, the Lions were 7-0 at the time and had beaten UNLV on the road and Georgetown on a neutral court. You can understand why a machine would like those numbers. Still, it looked very strange to have LMU in the Top 10 of a national ranking – especially when it was the such a highly anticipated one.
As the season wore on and the rankings started to better match public opinion and its “eye test”, the din surrounding the NET faded to some degree. However, while the actual rankings were the main cause for consternation, the NCAA also faced criticism on the technical side of things.
The primary source for the rankings, the NCAA’s website, was often updated at random and seemed as though it was being done manually. On some days, rankings were released well after games started, which potentially affected writers, bettors, and analysts. The issue led to some contention on social media, including a testy exchange between NCAA Director of Media Coordination, and Kerry Miller of Bleacher Report.
You want to talk ridiculous? It's ridiculous that your instinct is to go to Twitter and complain and assume something shady is going on instead of doing what a good journalist would do: Ask the question to someone who might be able to help you.
— David Worlock (@DavidWorlock) February 17, 2019
The biggest question throughout the season – more than what the daily rankings looked like, more than how the website functioned, or even how the formula was concocted – was how the NET would be used in the NCAA Tournament selection process.
When the NET was introduced as the replacement to the RPI, it was unclear just how important the metric would be in terms of selecting the field of 68 for the NCAA Tournament. Bear in mind that the NCAA includes other metrics on the team sheets that they use to select the field, including systems developed by Ken Pomeroy, Jeff Sagarin, Kevin Pauga, and ESPN.
This was the NCAA’s own metric, though? Would it be given preferential treatment come Selection Sunday? Or would it just be one more number?
But with the strings being pulled from behind a shroud of fancy algorithms (and almost surely some non-disclosure agreements), the NCAA had little to offer quantitatively to support its specific rankings. That opened to door to criticism throughout the season, even after the ratings began to normalize. Some teams, it was thought, were benefiting from inflated NET rankings.