Originally Posted by
uh_no
This needs to be driven home. People are accostomed to kenpom, and human polls, and all the other rating systems that take a significant amount of pre-season data into account at this time of the year. NET does not.
So on the first day of the year, hartford beats grambling by 30. Duke beats UK by 30 (never gets old) (assuming similar tempi). Congratulations, hartford and Duke look the same to the system despite anyone under the sun telling you that duke is a lot better than hartford. Then duke plays hartford, beats them by 70 and wow, okay now we have more data to rank those teams relatively. We'll get that for a lot of teams once they start conference play.
I really just ask that people stop complaining about it until closer to march. And stop complaining that the rankings differ from KP or whomever else. It's not supposed to be KP. It's not supposed to be predictive.
On NCSU, which people seem to be hemming about, it's in the right ballpark. KP has them at 21, and NET has them at 8. yeah it's a 2 seed vs a 5 seed, but that'll shake out with conference play, and it's certainly not the issues we saw with RPI when you'd have teams in the 30's and 40's in the top 4 seeds (cough cough st. louis).
WRT nevada, theres a bit of a misunderstanding of SOS. People seem to use it as a be-all-end-all...but it's not...it's more nuanced. Houson has 3 wins against teams in the top 50. Nevada has no games at all against teams in the top 50. Even if nevada's overall SOS is higher, houston has better performances against better teams. the SOS in these rankings is an output of the algorithm, not an input. I imagine nevada will not do well in NET at all because nobody on their schedule is challenging. This makes sense, though. The NCAA has a vested interest in having people play good teams. Nevada didn't, and it seems that the ranking is appropriately penalizing them.