NCAA announces it has made major change in how teams are selected for NCAA Tournament
By Keith Farner
Published:
So long, RPI. Hello NCAA Evaluation Tool, or NET.
The NCAA announced on Wednesday that it is abandoning the RPI as its primary data point for selecting and seeding the men’s basketball NCAA Tournament. The new ranking system was approved in late July, the NCAA said, after months of consultation with the Division I Men’s Basketball Committee, the National Association of Basketball Coaches, top basketball analytics experts and Google Cloud Professional Services.
This is the second straight year the committee has made a significant change. Last season, a quadrant system was adopted to place greater emphasis on winning road games on the team sheets, which offer a snapshot of each team’s schedule and results. The existing quadrant system still will be used on team sheets, with the NET replacing the RPI to sort games based on the opponent’s ranking.
The new system uses game results, strength of schedule, game location, scoring margin, net offensive and defensive efficiency, and the quality of wins and losses. To make sense of team performance data, late-season games (including from the NCAA tournament) were used as test sets to develop a ranking model leveraging machine learning techniques.
“What has been developed is a contemporary method of looking at teams analytically, using results-based and predictive metrics that will assist the Men’s Basketball Committee as it reviews games throughout the season,” said Dan Gavitt, senior vice president of basketball for the NCAA. “While no perfect rankings exist, using the results of past tournaments will help ensure that the rankings are built on an objective source of truth.”
The RPI was first used in 1981 and was developed by the NCAA to provide supplemental data to the men’s basketball committee, which is responsible for selecting at-large teams and seeding and bracketing teams in the men’s basketball championship each year. The RPI still will be used by other Division I sports committees, including women’s basketball.
A former newspaper veteran, Keith Farner is a news manager for Saturday Down South.
