You can totally ignore the NET

There is absolutely no reason to care about these numbers right now

Photo credit: Bing AI

Who remembers when the NCAA first revealed the NET? God, it was hilarious.

The early winter of 2018 was an exciting time, particularly for people who spend too much of their existence writing or talking or obsessing (or points at self all three) about the process of NCAA Tournament selection — but also just for your regular old college hoops fan, too. Gone was the bad old Ratings Percentage Index, a much simpler and much-maligned artifact of a bygone statistical time. In was a brand new metric, one created in consultation with leading analytics folks, one designed to incorporate essential efficiency indicators into a much more complex formula. Hooray! New metric! Goodbye RPI! Fun acronym! Let’s see what this NCAA Evaluation Tool is really all about!

And then all hell broke loose. Despite some pretty aggressive messaging out of the NCAA office — guys, this thing is new, it’s going to look a little wonky at first, it’s designed to get better as the sample gets bigger, don’t freak out — people freaked out.

Ohio State was the first No. 1 in the history of the brand new metric; the Buckeyes would finish 20-15 and 44th in adjusted efficiency. Kentucky wasn’t in the top 25. Radford ranked 22nd. Loyola Marymount was 10th. People were very confused. A whole day of Twitter jokes, and more than a few genuinely angry complaints, ensued.

Nobody knew then what we all know now: This always happens. The first NET rankings of any new season are always weird. People also didn’t know that they shouldn’t care. Turns out, you don’t have to start paying attention to these numbers until, like, February, if that. Right now, in early December, the NET is functionally useless. Ignore it. Do yourself a huge favor, and pretend they don’t even exist.

After years of this routine, you would assume most college hoops folks would understand it intuitively. We’ve been down this road many times before. Which is why it was so funny seeing so much NET-related anger on the timeline again Monday, when the first rankings of the 2023-24 season were released.