It is impossible to turn on a college basketball game in the month of February and not hear some mention of the NET rankings. There are often graphics in the middle of games during timeouts that show NET rankings and what each team’s NET is. These graphics never bother me because I know what the NET ranking is and what it is trying to accomplish, but there are many fans who don’t appreciate or know what the NET is used for.
The NET is an efficiency ranking created by the NCAA in 2018. It is calculated using game results, strength of schedule, game location, offensive and defensive efficiency, and the quality of the win or loss. If a team still plays well on the road and loses, they may still go up in the NET rankings. The most important thing to remember about all of this is that the NET is used by the NCAA as a primary sorting tool splitting the teams into quadrants. Anything in quadrants 1 and 2 will be viewed as a good win in the eyes of the NCAA tournament committee. Anything in quadrants 3 and 4 will be deemed as a non-quality win. In other words, quad 1 and 2 losses don’t hurt, whereas quad 3 and 4 losses could hurt you if you have too many.
One of the main advantages of the NET, or at least what everyone was told, was that teams were not able to game the NET. Given that it included efficiency numbers and your strength of schedule. Meaning if you blew out a bunch of bad teams that wouldn’t give you as many NET points. If you were to blow out ranked teams it would help your NET a lot. It has helped with competition so the big-time schools are now playing each other instead of playing buy games.
The NET has unintentionally favored the power schools. The formula used is one that should create parity but it has had the opposite effect. Looking deeper into the numbers it shows just how much the power conference schools dominate and control college basketball. To provide some more context here is how the quadrant system breaks out for the NET rankings.
- Quadrant 1- Home 1-30 Neutral 1-50 Away 1-75
· Quadrant 2- Home 31-75 Neutral 51-100 Away 76-135
· Quadrant 3- Home 76-160 Neutral 101-200 Away 136-240
· Quadrant 4- Home 161-353 Neutral 201-353 Away 241-364
Let’s just focus on the top 75 so a quad 1 win. In the top 75, 55 out of the 75 teams come from a Power Conference when you break it down to the top 50 42 out of the 50 teams come from a power league. Within that top 50 of the NET, there are 6 ACC teams, 8 Big 12 teams, 4 Big East teams, 10 Big Ten teams, and 14 SEC teams. The Big Ten and SEC are playing a quad 1 game every night. Those teams will have an unfair advantage when it comes to NCAA tournament selection, especially if they are playing a quad 1 game every night.
The committee puts a premium on quad 1 games and if you happen to be a middling team in a power conference that has a good two weeks and avoids losses to the bad teams in your league you may very well find your way into the tournament. Is it fair for that to happen? Is it gaming the NET? I don’t think it is unfair nor is it gaming the NET. The system was created to work this way and favor the teams who beat quality teams and have a higher strength of schedule.
The power schools are always going to have a higher strength of schedule because the teams in the power leagues are better and have more talent, or at least that is how they are perceived and viewed. Do I think that the NET system is unintentionally adding more weight to power conference schools and boosting their rankings? Yes, I do think that. The data also shows that.
If you were to go and look at the data and parse it out from 1-100 you would see that some of those teams like 11-10 Rutgers shouldn’t be in the top 75. They have not won enough, but they do have a win against UCLA at home, and they beat Nebraska in Lincoln. Those are two quad 1 wins that they have, and both are against teams who are likely to find themselves in the tournament, which is weighing their NET higher because of those two games. They don’t always seem to take losses into account as much. Rutgers did lose at Kennesaw State yet still finds themselves in the top 75. The top 75 is good enough to be selected to the Crown or the NIT when the season ends. Should Rutgers be playing in the postseason?
The NET has its flaws, mainly how it weights wins and losses for power conference teams vs wins and losses for mid-major teams. Things get looked at every couple of seasons and the metric is improving. The NET is here to stay but everything makes sense now why the coaches and the NCAA want to expand the tournament for more power conference schools.