Quote Originally Posted by pcal6vb View Post
Following on the St Mary's & UConn discussion, and also (from one of the other threads), the fact that Ohio State is #29 in the NET despite having a record of 11-10: I understand that NET takes into account (from the NCAA's own website, https://www.ncaa.com/news/basketball...ings-explained) "strength of schedule, game location, scoring margin, net offensive and defensive efficiency, and the quality of wins and losses."

If one were to hypothesize the most extreme example - a team that finished the season 0-25, with all 25 losses coming on the road to Q1 teams, losing by 1 point in each game, while maintaining overall high net ratings on offense and defense - could that team finish high up in the NET rankings?

I realize this is an absurd example, but I'm just trying to understand how much weight the system is giving to performance (including against expectations), excluding wins and losses.
Your hypothetical is not likely to occur given that the NET Rankings do have not only an efficiency-type component (which would help the 0-25 team in your example), but also have a results-based component (the "Team Value Index") in which the losses would count and drag down your 0-25 team's rating. But, I don't think there is any way to better "understand how much weight" the system is giving to the relative components, as the NCAA hasn't disclosed the weighting as between the Team Value Index component vs. the adjusted efficiency component.

Having said that, it's always worth remembering as Scott has emphasized that the NET Rankings themselves don't have intrinsic power in setting selection and seedings but, rather, they are mostly an ordering tool for the committee members to use to look at actual wins and losses results, but with obvious focus on Quad 1 wins and Quad 3-4 losses.

Here's a few snips from a recent (late 2022) NCAA release explaining the components of the NET and their (limited) role in the Selection Committee's decisions:

https://www.ncaa.com/news/basketball...ctive%20metric.

"In May 2020, the NCAA announced there will be changes made to the NCAA Evaluation Tool to increase accuracy and simplify it by reducing a five-component metric to just two. The remaining factors include [1] the Team Value Index (TVI), which is a result-based feature that rewards teams for beating quality opponents, particularly away from home, as well as [2] an adjusted net efficiency rating. The adjusted efficiency is a team’s net efficiency, adjusted for strength of opponent and location (home/away/neutral) across all games played…

In addition, the overall and non-conference strength of schedule [ratings provided to the NCAA selection committee] has been modernized to reflect a truer measure for how hard it is to defeat opponents. The strength of schedule is based on rating every game on a team's schedule for how hard it would be for an NCAA tournament-caliber team to win. It considers opponent strength and site of each game, assigning each game a difficulty score. Aggregating these across all games results in an overall expected win percentage versus a team's schedule, which can be ranked to get a better measure of the strength of schedule. …

The number of Quadrant 1 wins and Quadrant 3/4 losses will be incredibly important when it comes time for NCAA tournament selection and seeding."