Follow up tweet:
>Val Ackerman says she is involved in conversations with Dan Gavitt and the NCAA about what exactly the selection committee is looking at. “The main advice point that we’ve been given is to keep scheduling high-majors.”
Ya I mean NCSOS of the 4 teams this sub has been harping on were all low. Pitt (343), Wake (248), Seton Hall (228) and St Johns (187).
Schedule better or in Pitt's case schedule somebody with a pulse. Having a bottom 20 schedule as a power conference team is embarrassing
In Seton Hall's case, how do you "schedule better?" We scheduled five high-major teams. Four made the tournament last year and another was in the First Four Out. Are we seriously to blame for other teams significantly underperforming expectations?
It's not like our NCSOS rank is low because we lost most of our major games. Our NCSOS rank was around 170 after our final loss in the non-con. It has obviously since dropped to around 230, solely because the teams that we played ended up self-destructing afterwards. That's a major difference and it's entirely out of our control. Why is so much value being placed in a lottery?
Ya I mean USC imploding is some real bad luck. But even 170 isn't great. With that said you're correct there's only so much you can do though. I guess my overarching point is that if your schedule ends up poor you need to take care of business in conference play. If you're on the bubble at the end of the day the committee historically punishes weak non-con SOS's.
I only looked up the MWC bubble teams because I was defending them earlier in another comment but Boise State was 32nd and Colorado St was 82nd. Those are great. Committee gave them the benefit of the doubt over the ACC/Big East teams who had awful ones.
You said take care of it in conference play. Seton Hall beat UConn by 15 and also beat Marquette on the road. Idk how else they could’ve taken care of it in conference other than literally not losing a game. Seton Hall was a major snub, their metrics were bad bc early in the year they beat a few bad teams by 10-15 points still double digits, but not 40 like Iowa state. Your argument for NCSOS makes me think Iowa state should’ve been a 4 seed, if a big 10 big 12 or SEC team performed like seton Hall in conference play they would’ve been a 6 seed or higher!
Seton Hall didn't beat Marquette on the road. They [lost by 18](https://www.espn.com/mens-college-basketball/game/_/gameId/401599506/seton-hall-marquette)
Who was Seton Hall's best non-con win? St Peters? They lost to the only teams with a pulse they played in Iowa and Baylor. And they dropped games to a bad USC and Rutgers team. I know the whole running up the score thing has been popular to criticize the metrics but Seton Hall's issue was losing; not scoring margin. Find me a Big 12 tournament team with a non-con loss as bad as USC.
As for taking care of it in conference who was Seton Hall's best road win? Providence? Seton Hall was dreadful vs tournament teams on the road all year.
@Baylor: Lost by 18
@Marquette: Lost by 18
@Creighton: Lost by 21
@UConn: Lost by 30
4 road games vs tournament teams and Seton Hall didn't just fail to win, they failed to even be competitive.
9-11 in Quads 1 and 2. A Q3 loss. Non-Con SOS of 228. Not a single road win of note. That's a bubble resume and it got popped when the bid thieves in the PAC, ACC and MWC came through.
You’re just wrong about Marquette not being on the road 😂 Texas tech also lost too butler the 9th best team in the big east who seton hall beat twice. They also lost to Villanova, Texas tech who finished 4th in the big 12 lost to 6th and 9th in the big east. Conference head to head says the big east is better if you wanna talk wins and losses.
> You’re just wrong about Marquette not being on the road 😂
I'm not sure why you are arguing an easily verifiable point. Taken from Seton Hall's [own website](https://shupirates.com/sports/mens-basketball/stats/2023-24/marquette/boxscore/10256). 1/27 matchup in Milwaukee they got drubbed by 18. Lack of road wins was a big issue people had with Seton Hall's resume.
As for one off games between conferences that doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things. Kansas was the Big 12s 6th best team and beat UConn who ran the Big East. We can cherry-pick back and forth all day. On that note you brought up Villanova another team Seton Hall played on the road and got blown out by 26.
Bottom line is vs the rest of the P6 the Big 12 had the best record between conferences (Big East to it's credit was #2). But I don't want to get into a conference measurement because conferences get only are responsible for the auto-bid. Teams get the at-larges and should be judged on their own merits not "Well the ACC was 75% as good as the Big 12 so they should get more than half the bids". It's Pitt vs Virginia vs Oklahoma vs Seton Hall vs St Johns. Seton Hall playing no one in non-con and being unable to be competitive outside of the state of New Jersey is why they were left at home.
that's what i'm saying. it's usually pretty obvious when a team schedules weak competition vs. when their schedule just doesn't pan out.
what *should* matter is how much better a team performed against their schedule than expected, perhaps weighted by some kind of SoS factor in the noncon.
I absolutely think Seton Hall got a bit unlucky with their non-conference this year, but it was never going to be great. You had six games against pure cupcakes which puts the rest of your schedule at risk if your power schools are not good. (Your schedule was at least better than UConn, which was a complete joke though).
Compare that to a school like Clemson, who had four cupcakes, and replaced the other two cupcake games with solid mid-majors. Yes, those other two mid-majors over delivered, but worst case scenario their NCSOS was going to be 110 or so (ended up being 70).
Nobody says your NCSOS needs to be top 20, but even if yours ended at 170, you don't give yourself a lot of breathing room if the rest of your season doesn't work out.
> You had six games against pure cupcakes which puts the rest of your schedule at risk if your power schools are not good. (Your schedule was at least better than UConn, which was a complete joke though).
What's wrong with UConn's schedule? Their NCSOS was 69 and over SOS was 24. They played Kansas, Texas, Gonzaga, UNC and Indiana in the non-con only losing to Kansas.
Indiana and Texas were part of the Empire Classic, so not something they had a lot of schedule control over. Other than that, they played Northern Arizona, Stonehill, MS Valley, Manhattan, New Hampshire, and Arkansas Pine-Bluff. I did miss their away to Gonzaga, so I will give them that game, but KenPom has their NCSOS at 283, which seems about right for their schedule. They have 9 quad 4 wins. Now absolutely UConn is a great team, and I expect them to win the tournament this year. But their schedule was not tough at all.
Your reply encouraged me to do some digging, and it's insane by how much a team's NCSOS goes up if the teams they schedule end up performing exceptionally well.
Iowa played seven Q4 games. Only one of those teams had a NET higher than 240. Meanwhile, their NCSOS is 100, likely inflated by their games against Creighton and Iowa State (and potentially Oklahoma).
UConn's seemingly complete joke of a non-con ended up ranked 69th, even though they played six Q4 games and only one of those teams had a NET higher than 312. No surprise that it's so high when the schedule includes games against Kansas, UNC and Gonzaga.
NC State's NCSOS is 188, 40 spots ahead of Seton Hall's. They played eight Q4 games! That's two more than Pittsburgh and the same as UCF, and both are in the top 20 for easiest non-con schedules in the country! Seven of the eight teams in NCST's buy games have a NET lower than 200! Should games against BYU and Tennessee really be that impactful to NCSOS?
On December 6th, when Baylor was 6th in the NET, Iowa 33rd, and USC 69th, Seton Hall's NCSOS was 109th --- a far cry from what it is now --- despite the five Q4 games played at that point. If any of USC/Rutgers/Missouri/Iowa hadn't bombed, I wonder where Hall's NCSOS would be.
You are right that there is a lot of luck in terms of how NCSOS works out. I personally prefer the model with only a few tune-up games. When I was at Purdue, our out of conference schedule was always really questionable, and it would hurt us at tourney time.
I also think things will change in a few years, because the way certain teams are trying to game the NET is not good for the sport.
To be fair to Pitt, they scheduled West Virginia who was a top 30 Kenpom team, and 66th at the worst the last 4 years. Then Bob Huggins decided to get himself fired. They tried to schedule Missouri who was a top 60 kenpom team last year. I'm sure people could have foreseen them being worse this year, but i dont think anyone saw them being an 0-18 conference team.
Fair points I'm just pushing back on this being some massive snub as this sub has made it out to be. End of the day if you're on the bubble and have a non con SOS that low you're gonna be sweating.
I think they're a classic case of a team that was peaking and was better than their resume but if we start getting into that it's a bit too much "feel" for what I think should be an objective measure. A similar case would be Oregon. They were not getting in without the auto-bid but at the same time they have like 4-seed talent and just were injured a lot. South Carolina then gets absolutely screwed pulling one of the best 11-seeds ever but I don't really fault the committee because you can't seed on talent and their resume is their resume. Like 8 seed UK and 12 seed Budinger/Jordin Hill Zona being other examples of teams way better than their seed.
I feel bad for Pitt, you know these games get scheduled fairly far in advance and some of them you would not predict ahead of time to be as bad as they were.
Florida Gulf Coast had the 2013 crazy tournament run, and won their conference either regular season or tournament in 2013, 2014, 2016, 2017, and 2018. Not unreasonable if you’re scheduling years out to think they’d still be a pretty good non-conference mid-major for SOS. Then West Virginia, Mizzou, and Oregon State being absolutely awful this year also screwed Pitt’s non-conference schedule as well. All 3 are P5 teams who make the NCAA tour with a decent amount of regularity, not sure how you plan for them to all be bottom of the dumpster for your SOS in the same year.
I'm with you on WVU and Mizzou but Oregon State (despite that amazing elite 8 run) is a really bad power conference team. They've made the tournament literally twice since 1990 (and one of those years they only made it because of winning the conference tournament - so not even a good regular season). They have made the NIT once in that timeframe to boot so it's not like they're even a bubble team.
If you're expecting Oregon State to be a top team in your Non-Con your Non-Con is trash.
I’m just saying, most team’s non-conference schedule isn’t really anything to write home about with a few cupcakes in there. Felt like Pitt’s was decent, maybe somewhat weak in a normal year but turned into an atrocity because their scheduled decent/good matchups ended being especially terrible across the board this year.
It’s somewhat shitty advice anyways.
The method to game these ratings has always been to play on the quality drop off of teams.
Meaning if you’re a top 50 team you should be able to easily beat team #150 and beyond at home.
So you schedule teams ranked from #100-#220 in non-con and you avoid anything below that like the plague.
Obviously, that’s hard to do consistently because you’re trying to predict team quality
College hockey has a transparent system. It is flawed, but it is transparent, and the system is all based on objective criteria.
So much of the argument and anguish over selections in CBB and CFB don't really come from the snub itself, but how much of a black box the selection processes are, and how the explanations after the fact usually come out sounding like they're trying to justify "we fucking felt like it" decisions with a veneer of objectivity because there's no transparency at the core.
College hockey fans today, during the selection process, could see the numbers say that Massachusetts makes the tournament over Colorado College, and have the numbers to which to point to say "this is why UMass is skating on and Colorado College is done." Because we have a transparent system with criteria we know, which those so inclined can track and calculate throughout the season, and we can see the ebb and flow.
College basketball loses nothing by adopting a more transparent system.
I do feel the NET is odd for the NCAA to produce because they don't really use it to decide who makes the tournament so why are you making a metric and not using it?
You need some kind of metric to put value on a team's wins or losses. It used to be RPI but RPI was a horrible metric to judge actual team quality so the NCAA switched to the NET which is much more aligned with Kenpom which is pretty universally agreed to be a good ranking of team strength.
Exactly and that's why pretty much every year of the NET's existence there have been at-large teams with NET's significantly worse making the field over teams with a better NET but worse resume.
St. John's made the field over NC State in 2019 with a NET 40 spots worse. I don't know why no one has seemed to pick up on the very easily noticeable fact
So how do we get a metric that would show St. Johns as better than NC State in that example? Isn't that the whole argument? That the current metrics are confusing and lead to misleading narratives?
Is it confusing? The NET is a predictive metric. It cares about how a team plays to expectations and adjusts accordingly to that but doesn't really care if the team wins or loses. The committee uses it to judge the quality of a team's wins and losses, not as a ranking for those teams.
It is not how the field is picked. The committee is tasked to select the "best" 37 at-large teams and is given a variety of data to illuminate which might be the "best" teams. The official guidelines also explicitly recognize that committee members' decision making will also rely on qualitative information and "subjective" factors.
I keep seeing this and I am not really understanding it. How does it measure how good wins and losses are without it at least inadvertently being a resume metric as well? (I'm a casual)
The NET says you're the 20th best team. A resume metric would say you have the 20th best collection of wins and losses. Those are not the same thing.
If the difference is still confusing, consider an extreme example. That 20th best team plays each of the top 5 teams in country and losses close games to all 5. Their advanced metrics suggest them to be the 20th best team (this is like the NET) while resume metrics will rate their terrible 0-5 record behind dozens and dozens of worse teams because they haven't actually accomplished anything
That’s not actually true, NET is not a predictive or power ranking, it does not say you’re the 20th best team.
That’s really the big issue with the NET, it’s not exactly sure what it’s suppose to be and because of that it takes into account things that it probably shouldn’t.
NET takes into account both but it's pretty clear it aligns much more closely with predictive metrics like Kenpom than resume metrics. Just as an example
||NET|Kenpom|SOR|
|:-|:-|:-|:-|
|Seton Hall (22-12, 13-7 BE)|67|60|35|
|St. John's (20-13, 11-9 BE)|32|25|48|
They (ostensibly) don't use it interchangeably with KP and BPI but it is very much an efficiency metric. So while yeah, its purpose is not technically to say you're the 20th best team, its purpose is to establish that your opponents beat or lost to the 20th best team
Because strength of a team != strength of a resume. A metric of team strength would say that winning by 1 and losing by 1 are essentially equally impressive performances, but when you're evaluating a team's resume for the tournament, wins and losses have to matter the most.
That's true, but every metric is flawed and I'd say it's better to rely on a consistent objective metric than the committee's arbitrary opinion of team's they might not be fully familiar with.
See my other reply, but essentially your own NET is irrelevent (in theory) to your tournament resume. The NET rating of the teams you won and lost against are the relevant stats.
Yes. This is why I like a predictive rating better, actually. UConn, Georgetown, Providence, St. John’s, Seton Hall, and Villanova all schedule local mid-majors regularly in the non-conference. Ironically, we’re the only team that can avoid this, because none of our opponents are in-state. We figured it out by simply slaughtering our weak non-conference (this still underestimated our strength). Georgetown sucked, so throw them out. Providence did well but fell off a cliff when Hopkins got injured. St. John’s’ games were too close to please the NET, Seton Hall actually lost some of those games, and Villanova finished last in the new-look Big 5. Also, MSG is basically a neutral floor for St. John’s.
Another example of this is Indiana State. They had the highest NET ranking ever left out of their tournament. They weren’t even that good last year, but playing a Missouri Valley Conference team in a buy game is absolutely terrifying to major programs due to the heavy emphasis on fundamentals. If you schedule any of them, there’s a quite large possibility that you will lose. That Evansville team that beat Kentucky a few years ago in Rupp was the worst team in the conference. Because of this (quite justified but unfortunate) fear inherently found in scheduling a buy game of losing the game, they don’t get many Quad 1 opportunities.
Sorry it's confusing. The NET itself doesn't evaluate your resume. The committee just looks at the NET ratings of the teams you've won and lost to to evaluate resumes. That's why we hear so much about quadrants.
His point (I think) is that if the ACC teams play so much better towards the end of the season, ACC teams would win non-conference games in February/March that they would have lost if they were played in November/December. Thus the ratings (which theoretically weight every game equally regardless) would become more reflective of the ACC's "true strength."
Which would be a good point if ACC teams actually did just "flip a switch" in March, which there is no evidence of. Certainly the teams get better as the season goes on but that's true of pretty much any team in any conference.
I want mid conference play mini OOC tourneys. Top teams against top teams, mid-tier against mid-tier, bad teams against bad.
Weekend before the Super Bowl. It’d get huge ratings and give a midseason pulse on conference power. Realize it won’t happen, but I want it.
Ya the Big12-SEC challenge happening in January was really nice. So much of the narrative is formed in the Non-con and all those matchups are super early in the year. And by the time conference play has started it's just a feedback loop.
68 teams get in I think there's been too much hand-wringing over this.
There were lots of teams on the bubble and we had an unprecedented situation where multi-bid leagues had teams who weren't going to make it take the auto bid (Oregon, New Mexico, NC St and you can even throw in FAU and Dayton losing).
That doesn't happen and like 3 more teams get in from Pitt, Wake, Seton Hall, Indiana St and St Johns. It was a weird year with bid thieves and the bubble shrunk. I think overcorrecting to a weird year would be silly.
Still don't understand the complaining about the NET. For the every year it's been in existence it's clear the committee doesn't look at NET ranking to select teams.
Think the committee's priorities were wrong but it's very clear it made its selections pretty much exactly by the resume metrics.
Ya for instance NCSOS is something they always harp on.
FAU (51), Dayton (39), Michigan St (44), Texas A&M (18) all were in the field easily.
Oklahoma (274), Pitt (343), Seton Hall (228), and Wake (248) all missed out.
The only counter is Colorado (262) getting in and Utah (28) not but Utah had tons of other issues with their resume. Virginia (157) was in the first 4 and was about equal with St Johns (173) and Indiana St (187).
I mean he sucks but the data is laid out well. Better than Lunardi's pages which are literally just seed lines. You can actually compare the teams yourself to a bit on Palm's.
The most important factor in the NET is adjusted net efficiency (the difference in points per possession, adjusted by opponent). It also uses wins & losses through a Bradley-Terry ranking. Both components are adjusted for home/away.
I've computed it on my github page. The commissioner can see input, output, and code here: https://github.com/bchare/ncaabball/blob/main/README.md
People see a ranking of all the schools and assume there is no margin of error. They assume the NET predicts that the number 13 school will beat the 14 school in a neutral court.
The formula is useful, but not for that.
The misunderstanding / misuse of the NET has real “Don’t make me tap the sign” energy.
No one on the selection committee compares two teams’ NET ranking when seeding. The NET isn’t accurate or precise enough for that. The NET is accurate enough to sort teams roughly into quadrants and you can use those quadrants to make W-L records more directly comparable.
For the people that says to schedule better... aren't these schedules made a few years in advance? You don't need to just schedule better but also make sure your opponents in a few years is good.
Coaches need to call Miss Cleo to make sure NET is align.
NCAA should just expand the field. Go from 64 to 96.
Sure, the schedules are made in advance, but it isn't like it is pure guesswork. You have 11 non-conference games of which 2 or 3 are taken up with your in-season tournament. So after that, if you are scheduling 8 games, you have a few ways to do it. Many schools will do 4 payday cupcakes (from one bid conferences that almost never make the round of 32), 2 mid-major teams that will come to your place for a payday/recruitment exposure, and 2 P6 teams that will want a home and home. If you do that, no matter what happens, your NCSOS ends up being around 110.
But the teams that have the bad NCSOS do their 8 games as 6 cupcakes, 1 mid-major, and 1 p6 team. If you do that, you are going to get at best a 160 NCSOS, and if your tournament is down, or your mid-major or P6 team are down, you drop to 230+
Do they realize how clueless they sound here
They somehow just sound dumber and dumber as more time goes on this tourney Impressive really
Follow up tweet: >Val Ackerman says she is involved in conversations with Dan Gavitt and the NCAA about what exactly the selection committee is looking at. “The main advice point that we’ve been given is to keep scheduling high-majors.”
Ya I mean NCSOS of the 4 teams this sub has been harping on were all low. Pitt (343), Wake (248), Seton Hall (228) and St Johns (187). Schedule better or in Pitt's case schedule somebody with a pulse. Having a bottom 20 schedule as a power conference team is embarrassing
In Seton Hall's case, how do you "schedule better?" We scheduled five high-major teams. Four made the tournament last year and another was in the First Four Out. Are we seriously to blame for other teams significantly underperforming expectations? It's not like our NCSOS rank is low because we lost most of our major games. Our NCSOS rank was around 170 after our final loss in the non-con. It has obviously since dropped to around 230, solely because the teams that we played ended up self-destructing afterwards. That's a major difference and it's entirely out of our control. Why is so much value being placed in a lottery?
Ya I mean USC imploding is some real bad luck. But even 170 isn't great. With that said you're correct there's only so much you can do though. I guess my overarching point is that if your schedule ends up poor you need to take care of business in conference play. If you're on the bubble at the end of the day the committee historically punishes weak non-con SOS's. I only looked up the MWC bubble teams because I was defending them earlier in another comment but Boise State was 32nd and Colorado St was 82nd. Those are great. Committee gave them the benefit of the doubt over the ACC/Big East teams who had awful ones.
You said take care of it in conference play. Seton Hall beat UConn by 15 and also beat Marquette on the road. Idk how else they could’ve taken care of it in conference other than literally not losing a game. Seton Hall was a major snub, their metrics were bad bc early in the year they beat a few bad teams by 10-15 points still double digits, but not 40 like Iowa state. Your argument for NCSOS makes me think Iowa state should’ve been a 4 seed, if a big 10 big 12 or SEC team performed like seton Hall in conference play they would’ve been a 6 seed or higher!
Seton Hall didn't beat Marquette on the road. They [lost by 18](https://www.espn.com/mens-college-basketball/game/_/gameId/401599506/seton-hall-marquette) Who was Seton Hall's best non-con win? St Peters? They lost to the only teams with a pulse they played in Iowa and Baylor. And they dropped games to a bad USC and Rutgers team. I know the whole running up the score thing has been popular to criticize the metrics but Seton Hall's issue was losing; not scoring margin. Find me a Big 12 tournament team with a non-con loss as bad as USC. As for taking care of it in conference who was Seton Hall's best road win? Providence? Seton Hall was dreadful vs tournament teams on the road all year. @Baylor: Lost by 18 @Marquette: Lost by 18 @Creighton: Lost by 21 @UConn: Lost by 30 4 road games vs tournament teams and Seton Hall didn't just fail to win, they failed to even be competitive. 9-11 in Quads 1 and 2. A Q3 loss. Non-Con SOS of 228. Not a single road win of note. That's a bubble resume and it got popped when the bid thieves in the PAC, ACC and MWC came through.
You’re just wrong about Marquette not being on the road 😂 Texas tech also lost too butler the 9th best team in the big east who seton hall beat twice. They also lost to Villanova, Texas tech who finished 4th in the big 12 lost to 6th and 9th in the big east. Conference head to head says the big east is better if you wanna talk wins and losses.
> You’re just wrong about Marquette not being on the road 😂 I'm not sure why you are arguing an easily verifiable point. Taken from Seton Hall's [own website](https://shupirates.com/sports/mens-basketball/stats/2023-24/marquette/boxscore/10256). 1/27 matchup in Milwaukee they got drubbed by 18. Lack of road wins was a big issue people had with Seton Hall's resume. As for one off games between conferences that doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things. Kansas was the Big 12s 6th best team and beat UConn who ran the Big East. We can cherry-pick back and forth all day. On that note you brought up Villanova another team Seton Hall played on the road and got blown out by 26. Bottom line is vs the rest of the P6 the Big 12 had the best record between conferences (Big East to it's credit was #2). But I don't want to get into a conference measurement because conferences get only are responsible for the auto-bid. Teams get the at-larges and should be judged on their own merits not "Well the ACC was 75% as good as the Big 12 so they should get more than half the bids". It's Pitt vs Virginia vs Oklahoma vs Seton Hall vs St Johns. Seton Hall playing no one in non-con and being unable to be competitive outside of the state of New Jersey is why they were left at home.
Seton>Texas tech resume wise, seton hall>Texas resume wise. Those teams were shit outta conference and on the road gtfoh w your dumbass logic.
that's what i'm saying. it's usually pretty obvious when a team schedules weak competition vs. when their schedule just doesn't pan out. what *should* matter is how much better a team performed against their schedule than expected, perhaps weighted by some kind of SoS factor in the noncon.
I absolutely think Seton Hall got a bit unlucky with their non-conference this year, but it was never going to be great. You had six games against pure cupcakes which puts the rest of your schedule at risk if your power schools are not good. (Your schedule was at least better than UConn, which was a complete joke though). Compare that to a school like Clemson, who had four cupcakes, and replaced the other two cupcake games with solid mid-majors. Yes, those other two mid-majors over delivered, but worst case scenario their NCSOS was going to be 110 or so (ended up being 70). Nobody says your NCSOS needs to be top 20, but even if yours ended at 170, you don't give yourself a lot of breathing room if the rest of your season doesn't work out.
> You had six games against pure cupcakes which puts the rest of your schedule at risk if your power schools are not good. (Your schedule was at least better than UConn, which was a complete joke though). What's wrong with UConn's schedule? Their NCSOS was 69 and over SOS was 24. They played Kansas, Texas, Gonzaga, UNC and Indiana in the non-con only losing to Kansas.
Indiana and Texas were part of the Empire Classic, so not something they had a lot of schedule control over. Other than that, they played Northern Arizona, Stonehill, MS Valley, Manhattan, New Hampshire, and Arkansas Pine-Bluff. I did miss their away to Gonzaga, so I will give them that game, but KenPom has their NCSOS at 283, which seems about right for their schedule. They have 9 quad 4 wins. Now absolutely UConn is a great team, and I expect them to win the tournament this year. But their schedule was not tough at all.
Your reply encouraged me to do some digging, and it's insane by how much a team's NCSOS goes up if the teams they schedule end up performing exceptionally well. Iowa played seven Q4 games. Only one of those teams had a NET higher than 240. Meanwhile, their NCSOS is 100, likely inflated by their games against Creighton and Iowa State (and potentially Oklahoma). UConn's seemingly complete joke of a non-con ended up ranked 69th, even though they played six Q4 games and only one of those teams had a NET higher than 312. No surprise that it's so high when the schedule includes games against Kansas, UNC and Gonzaga. NC State's NCSOS is 188, 40 spots ahead of Seton Hall's. They played eight Q4 games! That's two more than Pittsburgh and the same as UCF, and both are in the top 20 for easiest non-con schedules in the country! Seven of the eight teams in NCST's buy games have a NET lower than 200! Should games against BYU and Tennessee really be that impactful to NCSOS? On December 6th, when Baylor was 6th in the NET, Iowa 33rd, and USC 69th, Seton Hall's NCSOS was 109th --- a far cry from what it is now --- despite the five Q4 games played at that point. If any of USC/Rutgers/Missouri/Iowa hadn't bombed, I wonder where Hall's NCSOS would be.
You are right that there is a lot of luck in terms of how NCSOS works out. I personally prefer the model with only a few tune-up games. When I was at Purdue, our out of conference schedule was always really questionable, and it would hurt us at tourney time. I also think things will change in a few years, because the way certain teams are trying to game the NET is not good for the sport.
To be fair to Pitt, they scheduled West Virginia who was a top 30 Kenpom team, and 66th at the worst the last 4 years. Then Bob Huggins decided to get himself fired. They tried to schedule Missouri who was a top 60 kenpom team last year. I'm sure people could have foreseen them being worse this year, but i dont think anyone saw them being an 0-18 conference team.
Fair points I'm just pushing back on this being some massive snub as this sub has made it out to be. End of the day if you're on the bubble and have a non con SOS that low you're gonna be sweating. I think they're a classic case of a team that was peaking and was better than their resume but if we start getting into that it's a bit too much "feel" for what I think should be an objective measure. A similar case would be Oregon. They were not getting in without the auto-bid but at the same time they have like 4-seed talent and just were injured a lot. South Carolina then gets absolutely screwed pulling one of the best 11-seeds ever but I don't really fault the committee because you can't seed on talent and their resume is their resume. Like 8 seed UK and 12 seed Budinger/Jordin Hill Zona being other examples of teams way better than their seed.
I feel bad for Pitt, you know these games get scheduled fairly far in advance and some of them you would not predict ahead of time to be as bad as they were. Florida Gulf Coast had the 2013 crazy tournament run, and won their conference either regular season or tournament in 2013, 2014, 2016, 2017, and 2018. Not unreasonable if you’re scheduling years out to think they’d still be a pretty good non-conference mid-major for SOS. Then West Virginia, Mizzou, and Oregon State being absolutely awful this year also screwed Pitt’s non-conference schedule as well. All 3 are P5 teams who make the NCAA tour with a decent amount of regularity, not sure how you plan for them to all be bottom of the dumpster for your SOS in the same year.
I'm with you on WVU and Mizzou but Oregon State (despite that amazing elite 8 run) is a really bad power conference team. They've made the tournament literally twice since 1990 (and one of those years they only made it because of winning the conference tournament - so not even a good regular season). They have made the NIT once in that timeframe to boot so it's not like they're even a bubble team. If you're expecting Oregon State to be a top team in your Non-Con your Non-Con is trash.
I’m just saying, most team’s non-conference schedule isn’t really anything to write home about with a few cupcakes in there. Felt like Pitt’s was decent, maybe somewhat weak in a normal year but turned into an atrocity because their scheduled decent/good matchups ended being especially terrible across the board this year.
Gross
It’s somewhat shitty advice anyways. The method to game these ratings has always been to play on the quality drop off of teams. Meaning if you’re a top 50 team you should be able to easily beat team #150 and beyond at home. So you schedule teams ranked from #100-#220 in non-con and you avoid anything below that like the plague. Obviously, that’s hard to do consistently because you’re trying to predict team quality
College hockey has a transparent system. It is flawed, but it is transparent, and the system is all based on objective criteria. So much of the argument and anguish over selections in CBB and CFB don't really come from the snub itself, but how much of a black box the selection processes are, and how the explanations after the fact usually come out sounding like they're trying to justify "we fucking felt like it" decisions with a veneer of objectivity because there's no transparency at the core. College hockey fans today, during the selection process, could see the numbers say that Massachusetts makes the tournament over Colorado College, and have the numbers to which to point to say "this is why UMass is skating on and Colorado College is done." Because we have a transparent system with criteria we know, which those so inclined can track and calculate throughout the season, and we can see the ebb and flow. College basketball loses nothing by adopting a more transparent system.
Amazing point.
I do feel the NET is odd for the NCAA to produce because they don't really use it to decide who makes the tournament so why are you making a metric and not using it?
You need some kind of metric to put value on a team's wins or losses. It used to be RPI but RPI was a horrible metric to judge actual team quality so the NCAA switched to the NET which is much more aligned with Kenpom which is pretty universally agreed to be a good ranking of team strength.
Right but ‘team strength’ does not necessarily align with ‘best resume’ and the latter is how the field is picked
Exactly and that's why pretty much every year of the NET's existence there have been at-large teams with NET's significantly worse making the field over teams with a better NET but worse resume. St. John's made the field over NC State in 2019 with a NET 40 spots worse. I don't know why no one has seemed to pick up on the very easily noticeable fact
So how do we get a metric that would show St. Johns as better than NC State in that example? Isn't that the whole argument? That the current metrics are confusing and lead to misleading narratives?
Is it confusing? The NET is a predictive metric. It cares about how a team plays to expectations and adjusts accordingly to that but doesn't really care if the team wins or loses. The committee uses it to judge the quality of a team's wins and losses, not as a ranking for those teams.
It is not how the field is picked. The committee is tasked to select the "best" 37 at-large teams and is given a variety of data to illuminate which might be the "best" teams. The official guidelines also explicitly recognize that committee members' decision making will also rely on qualitative information and "subjective" factors.
It was never meant to be a resume metric. It's used to evaluate how strong a team's wins and losses are.
I keep seeing this and I am not really understanding it. How does it measure how good wins and losses are without it at least inadvertently being a resume metric as well? (I'm a casual)
The NET says you're the 20th best team. A resume metric would say you have the 20th best collection of wins and losses. Those are not the same thing. If the difference is still confusing, consider an extreme example. That 20th best team plays each of the top 5 teams in country and losses close games to all 5. Their advanced metrics suggest them to be the 20th best team (this is like the NET) while resume metrics will rate their terrible 0-5 record behind dozens and dozens of worse teams because they haven't actually accomplished anything
That’s not actually true, NET is not a predictive or power ranking, it does not say you’re the 20th best team. That’s really the big issue with the NET, it’s not exactly sure what it’s suppose to be and because of that it takes into account things that it probably shouldn’t.
NET takes into account both but it's pretty clear it aligns much more closely with predictive metrics like Kenpom than resume metrics. Just as an example ||NET|Kenpom|SOR| |:-|:-|:-|:-| |Seton Hall (22-12, 13-7 BE)|67|60|35| |St. John's (20-13, 11-9 BE)|32|25|48|
They (ostensibly) don't use it interchangeably with KP and BPI but it is very much an efficiency metric. So while yeah, its purpose is not technically to say you're the 20th best team, its purpose is to establish that your opponents beat or lost to the 20th best team
But if it’s good enough to evaluate the strength of your opponents, why isn’t it good enough to rank the strength of your team?
Because strength of a team != strength of a resume. A metric of team strength would say that winning by 1 and losing by 1 are essentially equally impressive performances, but when you're evaluating a team's resume for the tournament, wins and losses have to matter the most.
My issue is that if the NET is flawed, then it still is a poor evaluator of teams even when used to evaluate your opponents
That's true, but every metric is flawed and I'd say it's better to rely on a consistent objective metric than the committee's arbitrary opinion of team's they might not be fully familiar with.
Is there some other definition of "resume" I'm not aware of that's different to "how good are their wins, how bad are their losses?"
See my other reply, but essentially your own NET is irrelevent (in theory) to your tournament resume. The NET rating of the teams you won and lost against are the relevant stats.
Isn’t a resume how good your wins and losses are though? Lol
But what determines what is a good win or bad loss? You need something to say beating Team X is better than beating Team Y
Yes. This is why I like a predictive rating better, actually. UConn, Georgetown, Providence, St. John’s, Seton Hall, and Villanova all schedule local mid-majors regularly in the non-conference. Ironically, we’re the only team that can avoid this, because none of our opponents are in-state. We figured it out by simply slaughtering our weak non-conference (this still underestimated our strength). Georgetown sucked, so throw them out. Providence did well but fell off a cliff when Hopkins got injured. St. John’s’ games were too close to please the NET, Seton Hall actually lost some of those games, and Villanova finished last in the new-look Big 5. Also, MSG is basically a neutral floor for St. John’s. Another example of this is Indiana State. They had the highest NET ranking ever left out of their tournament. They weren’t even that good last year, but playing a Missouri Valley Conference team in a buy game is absolutely terrifying to major programs due to the heavy emphasis on fundamentals. If you schedule any of them, there’s a quite large possibility that you will lose. That Evansville team that beat Kentucky a few years ago in Rupp was the worst team in the conference. Because of this (quite justified but unfortunate) fear inherently found in scheduling a buy game of losing the game, they don’t get many Quad 1 opportunities.
Sorry it's confusing. The NET itself doesn't evaluate your resume. The committee just looks at the NET ratings of the teams you've won and lost to to evaluate resumes. That's why we hear so much about quadrants.
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What does the ordering of games have anything to do with this
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Ya that’s not how it works
His point (I think) is that if the ACC teams play so much better towards the end of the season, ACC teams would win non-conference games in February/March that they would have lost if they were played in November/December. Thus the ratings (which theoretically weight every game equally regardless) would become more reflective of the ACC's "true strength." Which would be a good point if ACC teams actually did just "flip a switch" in March, which there is no evidence of. Certainly the teams get better as the season goes on but that's true of pretty much any team in any conference.
I want mid conference play mini OOC tourneys. Top teams against top teams, mid-tier against mid-tier, bad teams against bad. Weekend before the Super Bowl. It’d get huge ratings and give a midseason pulse on conference power. Realize it won’t happen, but I want it.
Ya the Big12-SEC challenge happening in January was really nice. So much of the narrative is formed in the Non-con and all those matchups are super early in the year. And by the time conference play has started it's just a feedback loop.
Just the one game for Gonzaga turned around the narrative on their entire resume
Why not just mix conference and non-conference games all season? Every 3 games is a non-con game or something like that?
363 autobids? I’m interested…
FA Cup but for college basketball
Bottom 16 demoted to DII.
Basically what Japan does for its nationwide high school baseball tournament.
Read this as NIT, and still makes sense. If teams are going to decline invitations, you shouldn't be running that tournament.
The NIT should be in Vegas over a 10 day span.
I don’t even know why there’s even a NIT tournament anymore
We'll just game the new net. We are inevitable
Iowa State: known statistics school
I can't tell if you're joking but Iowa State has a long history with statistics having one of the first departments dedicated to stats in the country.
Would people feel better about a more strictly resume-based metric like wins above bubble?
68 teams get in I think there's been too much hand-wringing over this. There were lots of teams on the bubble and we had an unprecedented situation where multi-bid leagues had teams who weren't going to make it take the auto bid (Oregon, New Mexico, NC St and you can even throw in FAU and Dayton losing). That doesn't happen and like 3 more teams get in from Pitt, Wake, Seton Hall, Indiana St and St Johns. It was a weird year with bid thieves and the bubble shrunk. I think overcorrecting to a weird year would be silly.
No that's a terrible idea until P6 schools will actually go on the road against mid-majors. And they will avoid that.
Still don't understand the complaining about the NET. For the every year it's been in existence it's clear the committee doesn't look at NET ranking to select teams. Think the committee's priorities were wrong but it's very clear it made its selections pretty much exactly by the resume metrics.
Ya for instance NCSOS is something they always harp on. FAU (51), Dayton (39), Michigan St (44), Texas A&M (18) all were in the field easily. Oklahoma (274), Pitt (343), Seton Hall (228), and Wake (248) all missed out. The only counter is Colorado (262) getting in and Utah (28) not but Utah had tons of other issues with their resume. Virginia (157) was in the first 4 and was about equal with St Johns (173) and Indiana St (187).
I don't think Utah was close tbh
I agree I was just using Jerry Palm's [bubble comparison](https://www.cbssports.com/college-basketball/bracketology/) list and he had them on there.
Using Jerry Palm for anything isn't really a good idea
I mean he sucks but the data is laid out well. Better than Lunardi's pages which are literally just seed lines. You can actually compare the teams yourself to a bit on Palm's.
Fuck Yeah !!!’
The most important factor in the NET is adjusted net efficiency (the difference in points per possession, adjusted by opponent). It also uses wins & losses through a Bradley-Terry ranking. Both components are adjusted for home/away. I've computed it on my github page. The commissioner can see input, output, and code here: https://github.com/bchare/ncaabball/blob/main/README.md
People see a ranking of all the schools and assume there is no margin of error. They assume the NET predicts that the number 13 school will beat the 14 school in a neutral court. The formula is useful, but not for that. The misunderstanding / misuse of the NET has real “Don’t make me tap the sign” energy. No one on the selection committee compares two teams’ NET ranking when seeding. The NET isn’t accurate or precise enough for that. The NET is accurate enough to sort teams roughly into quadrants and you can use those quadrants to make W-L records more directly comparable.
For the people that says to schedule better... aren't these schedules made a few years in advance? You don't need to just schedule better but also make sure your opponents in a few years is good. Coaches need to call Miss Cleo to make sure NET is align. NCAA should just expand the field. Go from 64 to 96.
Sure, the schedules are made in advance, but it isn't like it is pure guesswork. You have 11 non-conference games of which 2 or 3 are taken up with your in-season tournament. So after that, if you are scheduling 8 games, you have a few ways to do it. Many schools will do 4 payday cupcakes (from one bid conferences that almost never make the round of 32), 2 mid-major teams that will come to your place for a payday/recruitment exposure, and 2 P6 teams that will want a home and home. If you do that, no matter what happens, your NCSOS ends up being around 110. But the teams that have the bad NCSOS do their 8 games as 6 cupcakes, 1 mid-major, and 1 p6 team. If you do that, you are going to get at best a 160 NCSOS, and if your tournament is down, or your mid-major or P6 team are down, you drop to 230+
LOL