Nothing but NET: the new path to Madness

TCU Basketball vs Baylor | January 5, 2019 | Fort Worth, TXFootball season is officially over and we turn our focus away from the exclusive velvet rope of the College Football Playoff and look towards the Madness of March. The basketball version of the selection committee has long relied on the Rating Percentage Index (RPI) as its lodestar, guiding Duke to the easiest path to the Final Four the bracket seeding and bursting the bubbles of teams deemed unworthy. For about as long, the RPI has been reviled by savvy hoops fans as a flawed, outdated, meaningless measure of a team’s season-long résumé. RPI is the NFL head coach Mike Mularkey of metrics. Enter the NCAA Evaluation Tool (NET); also reviled, flawed and meaningless, but new and shiny. NET is the NFL head coach Kliff Kingsbury of metrics. The NET took heavy criticism when first released, but has normalized some and should further do so as conference play gets into full swing. There will likely still be some oddball outliers, but I expect by the end of the season the NET will be a clear improvement over RPI.

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