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Just about everyone is having issues with the NCAA's new RPI replacement

Jack Baer
Staff writer
Just as everyone predicted, your No. 1-ranked Ohio State Buckeyes. (AP Photo)
Just as everyone predicted, your No. 1-ranked Ohio State Buckeyes. (AP Photo)

Cheers rang out in August when the NCAA announced it had finally found its replacement for the much-maligned RPI metric used by the tournament committee.

The new metric, known as the NCAA Evaluation Tool (NET), promised to usher in an era of statistically comprehensive rankings, or at least take something as simple as margin of victory into account. Per the NCAA’s release, NET relies on the statistical smorgasbord of game results, strength of schedule, game location, scoring margin, net offensive and defensive efficiency, and the quality of wins and losses.

Something that takes all of those things into account has to be accurate, right? Right?

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Well, the first edition of NET rankings came out on Monday and, well … here they are.

The first ever NCAA Evaluation Tool rankings

So that’s Ohio State, which ranks 16th in the AP Poll and does not have a win over a currently ranked team, at No. 1. Later, there’s known juggernaut Duke at No. 6, and the team that beat said juggernaut in Gonzaga at No. 5. And the top 10 is rounded out by Loyola Marymount, which ranks 122nd in the current KenPom rankings.

Kansas is No. 11. Belmont is No. 12. UNC is No. 21. Kentucky is No. 61 between Liberty and Saint Louis. A polite word for all of that would be “puzzling.”

College basketball world reacts to NET rankings

As you can imagine, some people disagreed with the rankings, which were met with a mixture of confusion, mockery and scorn by the college basketball world.

Multiple voices speculated that we might just be seeing a too-early version of the rankings, and it could take a while for the metric to come more in-line with what we expect. After all, most teams have only played as many as seven games.

That is a very limited sample to work with, even if you are taking a plethora of factors into account. The NCAA might have simply erred in choosing to release the first run of the rankings in November.

Statistical maven Nate Silver wasn’t quite as generous, calling the rankings the worst he has seen in any sport and saying that the NCAA needs to totally overhaul its shiny new metric.

In a subsequent tweet, Silver said he believes that NET “suffers from a ‘throw a bunch of metrics at the wall and see what sticks’ problem,” which is often characteristic of unthoughtful algorithm design.” That might not bode well for future versions of the NET rankings.

There are some other reasons to be skeptical of NET’s current composition, as ESPN notes, like how the metric caps credit for margin of victory at just 10 points, taking the air out of some major victories like Duke’s massacre of Kentucky, and doesn’t consider strength of opponent in its offensive and defensive efficiency rankings.

All of that is obviously less than ideal, but there is still plenty of time for the NET rankings to breathe and for the NCAA to tweak the metric behind closed doors if they fail to correct to expectations. If not, Selection Sunday figures to be a hoot.

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