OPINION

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By Malcolm Pace

Upon searching for college basketball rankings during the regular season, one may stumble upon a myriad of different lists and sources. As technology has become increasingly more prevalent in the sports world, men’s college basketball statistics have never been as plentiful or complex as they are today. 

For example, you might find the Ken Pomeroy Rankings, also known as KenPom, a Pythagorean calculation for expected winning percentage, mainly characterized by adjusted efficiency margin. This margin is calculated by adjusted offensive efficiency minus adjusted defensive efficiency, along with other characteristics, such as a strength of schedule rating. The KenPom rankings even include a luck rating and are formed by the compilation of these many metrics, calculated and programmed by Ken Pomeroy in 2006 and adjusted slightly in 2014, to produce a ranking system for every Division I basketball team. On the other end of the spectrum, you have the stalwart that is the Associated Press (AP) Poll, which is voted on by a panel of 63 sports writers and broadcasters, ranking the top 25 teams each Monday during the regular season. Yet, despite the two extremes and many options of possible ranking systems, the NCAA created its own system, the NCAA Evaluation Tool, also known as the NET ranking system.

Image credit: NCAA. 

Since the 2018-19 season, the NCAA has used the NET as the main apparatus for selecting the 68-team field for the NCAA Tournament, the Holy Grail of college sports. The Final Four, the culminating weekend of the NCAA Tournament, has been ranked as one of the elite sporting events in America by Bleacher Report, yet the tool that determines whether or not a team is included in the Big Dance is seemingly arbitrary. 

The NET rankings consist of four different metrics: Team Value Index, net efficiency, winning percentage, and adjusted winning percentage. Net efficiency, which ranks teams based on their offensive and defensive efficiencies, and winning percentage are somewhat self-explanatory and logical. 

The team-value index and adjusted winning percentage are where things get hairy. Each of the two metrics heavily weighs the importance of games on the road, as well as the quality of the opponent. However, the method in which the quality of opponent seems almost random at times, leaving the NET rankings in a confusing jumble.

• Wins and losses on the quadrant scale are sorted 1 through 4, Quadrant 1 being the best, and Quadrant four being the worst. 
• Quadrant 1 games are determined as such: games at home against teams 1-30 in the NET rankings, neutral site games against teams ranked 1-50, and away games against teams ranked 1-75. 
• Games at home against teams 31-75, neutral games against 51-100, and away games against 76-135 qualify as Quadrant 2 games, and Quadrants 3 and 4 are calculated in the same fashion. 

Now, that may sound somewhat logical, yet the Quadrants change as the season progresses. So a Quadrant 1 game on the road in November against a tough, Power Five opponent that was ranked in the top 30 in the NET rankings at the time, could become a Quadrant 2 or even 3 win in the future. This could result from an event such as the team losing its best player later on in the season, therefore changing the quality of opponent that they qualify as the season progresses.

It gets to the point where the NET rankings value good losses over actual wins. 

Photo credit: University of South Carolina Athletics. 

For example, during the basketball week of Monday, February 26 through Saturday, March 2, the 18th ranked (AP Poll) South Carolina Gamecocks (24-5 at the time) tallied back-to-back Quad 1 wins at Ole Miss and against Florida. However, they rose just one spot, from 48th in the NET rankings to 47th on Saturday. Meanwhile, the 20-9 Clemson Tigers leaped from 25th in the NET rankings to 22nd, after a Quad 2 loss to the 12-17 Notre Dame Fighting Irish on that Saturday. What logical, sensical ranking system can say that multiple, top-category (Quad 1) wins are less valuable than a mediocre, somewhat embarrassing (Quad 2) loss?

College basketball is a long season, spanning from November to April if your team makes it to the Final Four, amounting to a total of more than 35 games. My stance is that the value of stacking wins throughout the marathon that is the full season should be valued higher, because once you get to the tournament, a quality loss means you are eliminated, not that your ranking increases compared to a mediocre win.

It’s no secret that the NCAA is a flawed organization, but March Madness is the pinnacle of college sports: Cinderella stories and all-time greats, with the most passionate fans in the world, all over the best three weeks of the year for many sports fans. It is a near impossible to create a 68-team bracket that is perfectly correct, and some deserving teams will not make it every year and the seeding will be slightly skewed, but how the teams are selected is quite an easy thing to make logical and simple, yet the NCAA is failing at it.

The advanced analytics that comprise the NET Rankings are important, and it is the right spirit to value road games more than home games, but at some point, technology is overriding logic. A team that plays in an elite conference is bound to have more quality losses by the nature of the teams that they play, but a team that is dominating their conference cannot control that, and specifically in basketball, winning consistently requires a strong team overall. So to show that losses can, and often do, count more than wins is counterproductive. 

Basketball is a sport full of intangible aspects, many of which have huge outcomes on games, so when it comes time to pick the 68 teams that are supposed to provide the most entertaining, high-level games in March and April, I am steadfastly against relying on the NET Rankings. The eye test is critical with basketball; seeing the effort level on defense, the poise with which they play, and the overall impression that is left by them after watching them play. If the combination of said eye test and the advanced analytics are provided to a group of trusted, proven college basketball analysts, they should have the power to choose the 68-team field, not “school and conference administrators,” per the NCAA website.