NCAA Announces Changes to the NET Evaluation Tool for College Basketball

The NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Committee announced changes to the NCAA Evaluation Tool (NET) in order to increase accuracy and simplify certain components of the ranking metric systems.

The NET rating system will use solely adjusted net efficiency rating and Tam Value Index (TVI), which is a results-based feature that helps boost ratings for teams after beating quality opponents, per the NCAA. The adjusted efficiency is a team’s net efficiency, adjusted for strength of opponent and location (home/away/neutral) across all games played, according to the NCAA. 

Now, the NET won't use winning percentage, adjusted winning percentage and scoring margin to rank teams.  The changes were made following the committee consulted with Google Cloud Professional Services, which worked with the NCAA to develop the original NET, per the NCAA.

“When we adopted the NET in 2018, we had reviewed several seasons worth of data and we insisted that we would continue to evaluate the metric,” said Dan Gavitt, NCAA’s senior vice president of basketball, in a statement. “We’ve been very satisfied with its performance thus far, but it became evident after two seasons of use that this change would be an improvement. While we will continue to monitor the metric, I don’t anticipate any additional adjustments for several years. We believe this change will result in more precision throughout the season and will be easier for our membership and the public to understand."

The UTEP men's basketball team finished 195th in the NET ratings with a 14-15 record, while NM State ended up 104th in the ratings following their 23-6 record.