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NCAA tournament 2022 Bubble Watch: Brace yourself for a month of March Madness bracket selection drama

Regular Bubble Watch 2022 readers know that the NET rankings come up from time to time when assessing a team's chances of earning an at-large bid.

Strictly speaking, the NET is a sorting metric. The ranking carried by an opponent is used along with the game's location (home, road or neutral) to assess how much credit to give a team for a particular win.

In theory, a team's own NET ranking is useful merely for weighing the profiles of its opponents. That's the case in most instances.

Nevertheless, in the 2019 and 2021 selections that used the NET rankings, there was quite naturally a relationship between carrying a good number in the metric and a team's placement in the bracket.