Post by hchoops on Mar 2, 2021 11:31:02 GMT -5
From The Athletic
Eamonn Brennan 4h ago 10
Last week, in the vaunted, stately forum that is the Bubble Watch comments section, Tim S. expressed a sentiment we’ve been seeing more and more in the past few weeks: “I hope the committee doesn’t put too much stock in the NET,” Tim wrote. “When an analytics tool drops a team 15 spots for a late-season loss and has Colgate ranked 13th, it has issues.”
Bad news, everyone: Colgate is now No. 9.
Pity the Raiders. Two years ago Matt Langel’s team won 24 games and earned the Patriot League’s automatic bid. Last year Colgate went one better, going 25-9 before losing to Boston University, 64-61, in the Patriot League championship game. That Colgate is once again a quality team, having another quality season, is a completely uncontroversial circumstance, and in any other year it would go mostly undiscussed.
Instead, this season Colgate has become both a running joke — we’ve been semi-ironically updating Colgate’s NET on a twice-weekly basis, because we do find it pretty entertaining — and a cudgel with which to smack the NCAA Evaluation Tool itself hard over the head. If Colgate’s number is this screwed up, how can you trust any of it? And if you can’t trust any of it, shouldn’t the NCAA use a system that describes my favorite team as being way better than the NET seems to think it is? Wouldn’t that be more sensible?
You can see why these arguments get made. It’s the season of opportunism in college hoops. (We can’t tell you how many times we have friends ask us to explain why the NET ranks a certain bubble team less favorably than, say, KenPom or BPI.) Hot takes tend to get a bit hotter this time of year; suddenly, when everybody gets interested in the bubble and your average college hoops analyst is suddenly constantly asked to talk on TV about it, arguments start to come out of left field.
In many cases, this is what makes this time of year fun. Where the NET hate is concerned, though, it’s basically just wrong. Indeed, the NET — as it has since it was unleashed a couple of seasons ago — continues to do a pretty good job. Is it a perfect system? No. Was it vulnerable to the weirdness of a pandemic year, when the Patriot League canceled all of its nonconference games and the formula had to rely only on what Colgate did to members of its own league in a one-off dearth of data? Yes. Did the Patriot League’s statistical isolation from the rest of the sport make this possible? Yes. Will it happen again? Probably not! And, save one high-profile outlier, the NET has generally handled this season pretty well. Go ahead: Scroll up and down the rankings. Find us a team that looks weird. Is it really egregious? Does it look totally out of place? Does it diverge wildly? How wildly?
Generally speaking, as a blended measure of both how good teams are and how good their résumés are, the NET is doing a pretty sensible job. Sorry, but it just is.
Meanwhile, keep in mind the committee doesn’t just read off the rankings and build out its list of the top 70 teams in the country. It’s just a number, and one that may or may not matter much in the end. No one, after all, thinks Colgate’s predicament is anything other than weird and funny; no one thinks the committee is going to treat the Raiders like Alabama or even Loyola Chicago. In that way, the Great Colgate Fiasco of 2021 isn’t disqualifying. It’s proof that the system works.
Eamonn Brennan 4h ago 10
Last week, in the vaunted, stately forum that is the Bubble Watch comments section, Tim S. expressed a sentiment we’ve been seeing more and more in the past few weeks: “I hope the committee doesn’t put too much stock in the NET,” Tim wrote. “When an analytics tool drops a team 15 spots for a late-season loss and has Colgate ranked 13th, it has issues.”
Bad news, everyone: Colgate is now No. 9.
Pity the Raiders. Two years ago Matt Langel’s team won 24 games and earned the Patriot League’s automatic bid. Last year Colgate went one better, going 25-9 before losing to Boston University, 64-61, in the Patriot League championship game. That Colgate is once again a quality team, having another quality season, is a completely uncontroversial circumstance, and in any other year it would go mostly undiscussed.
Instead, this season Colgate has become both a running joke — we’ve been semi-ironically updating Colgate’s NET on a twice-weekly basis, because we do find it pretty entertaining — and a cudgel with which to smack the NCAA Evaluation Tool itself hard over the head. If Colgate’s number is this screwed up, how can you trust any of it? And if you can’t trust any of it, shouldn’t the NCAA use a system that describes my favorite team as being way better than the NET seems to think it is? Wouldn’t that be more sensible?
You can see why these arguments get made. It’s the season of opportunism in college hoops. (We can’t tell you how many times we have friends ask us to explain why the NET ranks a certain bubble team less favorably than, say, KenPom or BPI.) Hot takes tend to get a bit hotter this time of year; suddenly, when everybody gets interested in the bubble and your average college hoops analyst is suddenly constantly asked to talk on TV about it, arguments start to come out of left field.
In many cases, this is what makes this time of year fun. Where the NET hate is concerned, though, it’s basically just wrong. Indeed, the NET — as it has since it was unleashed a couple of seasons ago — continues to do a pretty good job. Is it a perfect system? No. Was it vulnerable to the weirdness of a pandemic year, when the Patriot League canceled all of its nonconference games and the formula had to rely only on what Colgate did to members of its own league in a one-off dearth of data? Yes. Did the Patriot League’s statistical isolation from the rest of the sport make this possible? Yes. Will it happen again? Probably not! And, save one high-profile outlier, the NET has generally handled this season pretty well. Go ahead: Scroll up and down the rankings. Find us a team that looks weird. Is it really egregious? Does it look totally out of place? Does it diverge wildly? How wildly?
Generally speaking, as a blended measure of both how good teams are and how good their résumés are, the NET is doing a pretty sensible job. Sorry, but it just is.
Meanwhile, keep in mind the committee doesn’t just read off the rankings and build out its list of the top 70 teams in the country. It’s just a number, and one that may or may not matter much in the end. No one, after all, thinks Colgate’s predicament is anything other than weird and funny; no one thinks the committee is going to treat the Raiders like Alabama or even Loyola Chicago. In that way, the Great Colgate Fiasco of 2021 isn’t disqualifying. It’s proof that the system works.