The NCAA released its NET rankings for the first time this year today (that, or I’ve been missing them), so let us say two things:
1. NET is fine. It does a fine job. It’s not overwhelmingly used by the committee, so it’s not extremely important, but it’s important, and it does a better job than RPI does. The NCAA’s done a bad job branding it—offering misleading explanations of how it works and making it a non-transparent system, which makes it harder to defend concretely—but it’s not bad.
2. People hate NET. They’ll hate anything if it says bad things about their team, but because they don’t understand NET, and because the NCAA often releases rankings from NET very early in the year, when it hasn’t had enough time to sort everything out and get teams where they belong (Boise State is 13th, Colgate is 16th, Drake is 20th, and yes, the NCAA is doing this for headlines and publicity which is pretty funny when you think about it, because it means they’re looking at people who hate NET, smirking, and intentionally fueling their hatred), it’s particularly easy to hate.
Combine these things with the parallelism of the acronyms NET and NIT, and we’re not going to pass up this opportunity to drum this into your brains:
NIT > NET.
Other notes for today:
- Everyone on our radar yesterday did what one would hope they’d do. Northwestern and SMU lost big. Georgia Tech won big. Duquesne took a bad loss to George Washington—we hadn’t had the Dukes on our list yesterday because they aren’t quite in the projected field, only A-10 fans care about them, and it was one of those tricky-conference-games-on-the-road that there are way too many of to count—but Duquesne wasn’t quite in the projected field anyway, so not a big deal.
- Colgate lost the back end of a two-game home set to Army, which you don’t want to do. Colgate’s still the Patriot League favorite, so this is relatively inconsequential, but it makes their being ranked 16th in NET an even better troll from the NCAA. Colgate will recede. The anger will not.
- In other Patriot League action, the fabled six-game Boston University/Holy Cross season series starts today. I would not personally make the trade if offered this phenomenon in exchange for everything the pandemic has done, but I will not fault any whose religion compels them to say they would.
- Oklahoma State, whose dangerous state we wrote about yesterday, hosts West Virginia tonight. There’s a right move. There’s a wrong move. We’ll see what they do.
- Maryland’s got a risky road game (in the bad sense) in Bloomington. Stanford’s got a risky road game (in the good sense) in Corvallis. Colorado State and San Diego State have their rematch.
- Northern Colorado and Montana have already tipped, despite it being just past 9:00 AM in Missoula. People only play sports at 9:00 AM if they’re a) children or b) hiding something. In this case, it’s the latter, and what they’re hiding is that Montana’s 0-3 to start Big Sky play.
Now go on out there and hate the NET for us.
