It's to the point in the season where broadcasters during college basketball games start rambling about metrics and rankings that sound like a foreign language.
There was a lot of confusion ahead of the College Football Playoff, and that's just based off one set of rankings. At the end of the day, a committee also chooses who gets into the NCAA Tournament and what they're seeded, but there's a lot more out there for how that committee makes their decisions.
Two of the most important and talked about resume boosters are the NET rankings and quadrants.
The NET rankings, which stand for the NCAA Evaluation Tool rankings, were developed as another metric to measure how good a college basketball team really is. The NET rankings take in account strength of schedule, game location, scoring margin, offensive and defensive efficiency, and quality of wins and losses.
Speaking of quality of wins and losses, that's also a major part in deciding if a team is good enough to dance or not. The NET rankings are used to measure the strength of wins and losses by quadrants.
Here's how those quadrants are broken down based on NET rankings, plus where the game was played.
- Quadrant 1: Home 1-30, Neutral 1-50, Away 1-75
- Quadrant 2: Home 31-75, Neutral 51-100, Away 76-135
- Quadrant 3: Home 76-160, Neutral 101-200, Away 135-240
- Quadrant 4: Home 161-353, Neutral 201-353, Away 241-353
It's also important to keep in mind that the value of a win or loss isn't written in Sharpie. A team could knock off some big-time teams and rise as a bigger win or loss for other teams. Or a team could tank and drop a quadrant, meaning a team that notched a Quadrant 1 win earlier in the season could have a Quadrant 2 win there by Selection Sunday.
For instance, Georgia just upset Oklahoma while the Sooners were at No. 45 in the NET rankings. That gave the Bulldogs a Quadrant 2 home win. However, OU has been as high as No. 35 this season. If the Sooners were to turn things around and get back on another winning streak, they could sneak into the top 30. That would then upgrade Georgia's win to Quadrant 1.
Basically, strength of schedule is fluid, but by this point in the season, it likely won't change too drastically, at least not for multiple teams on one schedule.
There are plenty of other metrics that could also be mentioned between now and March. KenPom and the Basketball Power Index help gauge how good a team really is. The WAB will focus more on a team's schedule.
All these rankings and metrics are especially important to keep up with during the back half of the season for bubble teams, like Oklahoma right now.
The Sooners are currently the first team left out of the NCAA Tournament, according to the NET rankings. But if the Sooners win a game and get bumped up just one spot to No. 46, they'd theoretically be in.
That's why each game and metric is so important, even when it seems like there's too many to influence anything.