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NCAA Basketball Tournament: NET replaces RPI for bracket seeding

By Shereen Rayan

SAN ANTONIO, TX - APRIL 02: Confetti sits on the court after the Villanova Wildcats defeated the Michigan Wolverines during the 2018 NCAA Men's Final Four National Championship game at the Alamodome on April 2, 2018 in San Antonio, Texas. Villanova defeated Michigan 79-62. (Photo by Ronald Martinez/Getty Images)
SAN ANTONIO, TX - APRIL 02: Confetti sits on the court after the Villanova Wildcats defeated the Michigan Wolverines during the 2018 NCAA Men's Final Four National Championship game at the Alamodome on April 2, 2018 in San Antonio, Texas. Villanova defeated Michigan 79-62. (Photo by Ronald Martinez/Getty Images) /
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This is the second consecutive year that the NCAA has made a significant change to the way they determine NCAA Tournament bracket seeding. The RPI will be replaced with the NET.

Each year, for the NCAA D1 Men’s Basketball Tournament, the bracketing of teams is selected by the NCAA Men’s Basketball Committee. Starting in 1981, the committee used the RPI rating as supplemental data. That’s going to change next season. The NCAA is going to adopt the ‘NCAA Evaluation Tool’ hereby referred too as NET.

NET will replace RPI for Men’s Basketball only for the 2018-19 season, the Women’s committee will continue to use the RPI.

According to the NCAA website, NET is based on:

  • Game results
  • Strength of schedule
  • Game location
  • Scoring margin
  • Net offensive
  • Defensive efficiency
  • Quality of wins and losses

To develop NET, machine learning techniques were leveraged in gauging the validity of the new measurement. The data used in the test included late-season games including NCAA tournament games. Sample game data was used with the NET model to predict the outcome of games and tweaked until the tests came out as accurate as possible.

Arizona Wildcats
Arizona Wildcats /

Arizona Wildcats

The Senior Vice President of Basketball for the NCAA, Dan Gavitt, believes that there is no perfect ranking but because they used past tournament results, the “Rankings are built on an objective source of truth.” He also feels this new algorithm, NET, is “A contemporary method of looking at teams analytically, using results-based and predictive metrics.”

Gavitt included the following people to help figure out what NET would include; Basketball Coaches Old Dominion’s Jeff Jones and Kentucky’s John Calipari along with analytical experts Ken Pomeroy (KenPom), Kevin Pauga (KPIsports.net rankings) and Jeff Sagarin (USA Today rankings).

Remember all the whining Calipari did on national TV after his team was seeded last season and he thought it was unfair? How could one forget? Coach Cal will not be able to complain this season if his team is good enough to make it to the Tournament. If he’s not happy, he can blame himself.

To make NET fair, the panel used the following rules:

  • Game date and order were omitted to give equal importance to both early and late-season games.
  • A cap of 10 points was applied to the winning margin to prevent rankings from encouraging unsportsmanlike play, such as needlessly running up the score in a game where the outcome was certain.

Along with NET, each teams sheet will include the following according to the NCAA website:

  • The Quadrant which was adopted last season to emphasize away-wins
    • 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 135-240
      Quadrant 4: Home 161-353, Neutral 201-353, Away 241-353
  • Kevin Pauga Index
  • ESPN’s results-oriented metric, the Strength of Record
  • Three predictive metrics via basketball analytics gurus Pomeroy and Sagarin
  • ESPN’s Basketball Power Index

https://twitter.com/marchmadness/status/1032282424888242177

What does this all mean? Well away tournaments, where all teams are playing away from home, will have much more importance in the rankings and it won’t matter that the games are played at the beginning of the season.

Arizona Basketball will travel to the Hawaiian island of Maui to take part in the Maui Invitational which takes place from November 19-21 at the Lahaina Civic Center. Eight Division I programs will compete, and tournament organizers stated that it’s “The first time in its 35-year history when Arizona, Auburn, Duke, Gonzaga, Illinois, Iowa State, San Diego State and Xavier visit the island.”

The reasons the organizers feel this is a significant tournament is because over the past five years:

  • 44 participating players have been drafted by the NBA
  • 13 teams that started their season in Maui advanced to the Sweet 16 or further into the NCAA Tournament during the same year

To add to the gravity of winning games in this Maui Tournament, all 12 games played will be shown on ESPN. This will be the seventh appearance in the Maui Invitational for Arizona who has taken home the trophy twice. Once in 2000 and the second in 2014. Here is the post game presser with head coach Sean Miller, Stanley Johnson and Rondae Hollis-Jefferson after No. 3 Arizona’s beat No. 15 San Diego State:

David Teel, Contact Reporter for the Daily Press, feels NET is a mystery but concludes: “Plugging venue into the formula was critical. So, too, was embracing offensive and defensive efficiency, which is essentially points per possession. The net efficiency is a team’s points per possession minus its points per possession allowed.”

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Teel reports that NET is like Pomeroy’s calculation where there is no adjustment for quality of a teams opponents. Teel performed some efficiency calculations on his own and only one of the four Final Four teams from last seasons NCAA Tournament checked out, Villanova. He surmised that it’s a mystery if NET is better because the NCAA cannot tell anyone how NET and RPI compared if both were used in past seasons. There you have it. What are your thoughts? 

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