NCAA develops new ranking system, replaces RPI

Tired of spending every college basketball season getting mad about the archaic rankings of the RPI?

You’re in luck! The RPI is dead.

The NCAA announced Wednesday that, effective immediately, they would be using the new NCAA Evaluation Tool (NET) to rank teams instead of the RPI.

What is NET? Glad you asked. Below is the explanation right from the NCAA’s release.

The NCAA Evaluation Tool, which will be known as the NET, relies on game results, strength of schedule, game location, scoring margin, net offensive and defensive efficiency, and the quality of wins and losses. To make sense of team performance data, late-season games (including from the NCAA tournament) were used as test sets to develop a ranking model leveraging machine learning techniques. The model, which used team performance data to predict the outcome of games in test sets, was optimized until it was as accurate as possible. The resulting model is the one that will be used as the NET going forward

Between this new system and the NCAA’s adoption of quadrants last season, it seems like we might finally be on the right path to getting the NCAA Tournament field seeded more accurately than ever.