Syracuse Basketball: NCAA streamlining NET for selecting tourney squads
By Neil Adler
In a move that Syracuse basketball and other programs will monitor, the NCAA is reducing the factors that it uses as part of its tournament evaluation tool.
When Syracuse basketball is perhaps in line for a possible Big Dance berth in the 2020-21 campaign or beyond, the Orange could prove at the benefit – or mercy – of a streamlined NCAA Evaluation Tool (“NET”).
That’s because the NCAA Division I men’s basketball committee has announced that, commencing with 2020-21, the NET system is changing to increase accuracy and become simpler by diminishing a five-component metric to just two, according to NCAA officials.
The remaining factors are the Team Value Index (“TVI”), a result-based feature that rewards teams for beating quality foes, particularly away from home, as well as an adjusted net efficiency rating.
Adjusted efficiency is a crew’s net efficiency, adjusted for strength of opponent and location (home, away or a neutral site) across all contests played.
The NCAA has also modernized the strength of schedule to “reflect a truer measure for how hard it is to defeat opponents. The strength of schedule is based on rating every game on a team’s schedule for how hard it would be for an NCAA tournament-caliber team to win. It considers opponent strength and site of each game, assigning each game a difficulty score,” says the press release.
NET will no longer use winning percentage, adjusted winning percentage or scoring margin as part of its factors for aiding the NCAA in picking groups for the Big Dance.
NCAA officials began using the NET ratings two years ago to replace the RPI in evaluating teams for March Madness. The updated NET aligns with the women’s basketball NET system, which the Division I women’s basketball committee revealed last week.
The streamlining of the NET “will result in more precision throughout the season and will be easier for our membership and the public to understand,” says Dan Gavitt, the NCAA’s senior vice president of basketball, in the organization’s media release. “While we will continue to monitor the metric, I don’t anticipate any additional adjustments for several years.”