Syracuse Basketball: Big Dance will add 2 new key metrics to selection process in 2025

Syracuse basketball, in the upcoming season, will look to get back to the annual NCAA Tournament following a three-year absence.

Ahead of the 2024-25 campaign, bracketologists don't appear to have the Orange in their projected fields of 68 for next spring's Big Dance, although these sorts of prognostications are super early at this juncture.

In any event, as it pertains to March Madness, some future developments to the greatest event in all of sports recently got announced by the NCAA, and I wanted to pass them along.

Let's break down future changes to the Big Dance, which hopefully Syracuse basketball will make this term.

Per a press release on the NCAA's Web site, the NCAA Division I men's basketball committee held its annual summer meeting this past week. The committee said that beginning with the 2025 Big Dance, the evaluation of schools and the selection process for the annual event will "include the Torvik and Wins Against Bubble rankings on the team sheets."

So what do these two metrics entail? Check out what CBS Sports senior writer Matt Norlander had to say: "BartTorvik.com, a predictive metric similar to KenPom.com, was approved as an official team sheet metric, per the NCAA's release. Torvik's T-Rank system has ascended in popularity in college basketball circles over the past half-decade. The other big add is a metric referred to as 'Wins Above Bubble,' which is résumé-based and in essence shows how many more (or fewer) wins a team has earned against its schedule vs. what an average bubble team would do against that same schedule. For the hardcore analytic community in basketball, Wins Above Bubble (WAB) has been regarded as the most objective of all metrics when it comes to evaluating résumé performance."

Dan Gavitt, the NCAA's senior vice president of basketball, said in part via the announcement, "The Torvik rankings, along with BPI and KenPom, give the committee three predictive ratings, while the WAB, Strength of Record and KPI give them three results-based metrics, all of which, in addition to the NET, will be beneficial to the team evaluation process."

The NET caught a lot of heat this past March right after the field for the 2024 NCAA Tournament was announced, as former Syracuse basketball head coach Jim Boeheim and other heavyweights in the sport had some pretty choice words about the NET ("NCAA Evaluation Tool").

These days, a hot-button topic is the potential expansion of the Big Dance, and as Norlander noted, at its annual summer meeting, the NCAA Division I men's basketball committee "didn't move closer to a decision" on possibly growing March Madness in the future.

The committee also approved Indianapolis to host the 2026 Division II and III men's tournament championship games, as well as the semifinals and finals of the NIT, along with the Final Four. Per reports, this will be the first time in the sport's history that the same city will host all four events, which I think is awesome.