When they NCAA announced last week they were doing away with RPI and ushering in the NET era, it was met nearly universally with praise.
That was largely a reflection of how little respect RPI endeavored after years of taking abuse for its outdated method and the NCAA tournament committee’s over-reliance upon it. So, really, when most applauded the NCAA’s move here, it was about what was going away, not what was replacing it.
And while NET is an improvement, there are some issues. As Rob Dauster noted here last week, keeping the formula a secret - and not running it back on previous years - is going to create issues.
Over at The Athletic, college basketball’s foremost analyst and rankings maven Ken Pomeroy went into even more detail on the issues of keeping the lid on the formula. Here’s what he wrote:
The other issue comes from how NET will be used. It’s going to be used as a sorting tool - ranking teams by how they fared on the extreme ends of the spectrum. Pomeroy again:
Again, ditching RPI was a step in the right direction, and we’ll have to see the results NET produces, but any rankings system is going to have its flaws. NET’s biggest may be one of the NCAA’s doing if they continue to keep the formula secret. In any limited sample size - such as one season - there are going to some weird results at times, and not knowing how they were achieved is only going to cause controversy, especially on Selection Sunday.