NCAA Tournament Projections: A Wild Trend in This Year's Bracket
Is there a major flaw in the NET rankings impacting this year's bracket?
I was texting with one of my fellow bracketologists the other day and the conversation came around to how weird a year this has been for placing teams in the bracket and seeding them. We both came up with reasons why, but the one I noticed most is the number of teams who have a good NET ranking but have played poor non-conference schedules. I decided to look and see if what I suspected was the case.
What I found even shocked me, someone who looks at many résumés a day. Of the top 70 teams in the NET, 60% of them had non-conference strength of schedules ranked 100th or worse. Almost 43% had a SOS of 200 or worse.
And that’s not all. There are 362 teams currently ranked in the NET ranking for Division I college basketball. Of the top 50 teams in the NET, 13 ranked in the lowest 15% of non-conference schedules. That means that of the top 50 teams, over 25% of them had some of the worst non-conference schedules in the country. For someone who has been doing this for over a quarter of a century, I have never seen anything like it. To be real, things have been trending this way for a few years, but the jump this year is off the charts.
What does this mean? It means that the best schools in the country don’t find value in scheduling strong opponents outside their conference, which, in my opinion, is really bad for college basketball. Why the sudden change in scheduling? We don’t know the entire NET formula so we can’t say for certain, but it appears that blowing inferior opponents out has a more positive effect on the NET ranking than playing tough opponents.
What can stop this trend? Two things: 1) A change to the NET formula which caps the efficiencies so as to lessen the positive effects of blowout wins, and 2) Having the committee penalize these teams when it comes time to select them for the NCAA tournament, either by not selecting them for the field or at least knocking them down a seed line or two when high non-con SOS numbers show up on their team sheets. The problem, of course, is that you can’t penalize them by dropping a seed line because there are so many teams with a bad SOS. Let’s hope something can be done, but with conferences ever-expanding, I fear this train can’t be stopped.
LAST FOUR IN: Gonzaga, Seton Hall, Wake Forest, TCU
FIRST FOUR OUT: Utah, Texas A&M, Pitt, Colorado
NEXT FOUR OUT: Ohio State, Memphis, Kansas State, Ole Miss
CONFERENCES WITH MULTIPLE BIDS
Big 12: 9
SEC: 7
Big Ten: 6
MW: 6
Big East: 5
ACC: 5
Pac-12: 2
AAC: 2
WCC: 2
Atlantic 10: 2
Next Monday, instead of my own bracket, I will present the bracket of the 2024 Mock Selection Committee, which meets this coming weekend. You can watch our entire selection process on our YouTube channel. The selection event runs from March 1-3 and begins on Friday at 3 p.m. ET.
Follow me on Twitter/X @tkbrackets. I will give you updates all season long as we make our way to Phoenix for the Final Four.
