The NCAA Tournament selection committee is moving on from the rating percentage index (RPI) as its primary tool for seeding teams ahead of March Madness.
RPI will be replaced by the NCAA Evaluation Tool (NET) and will be made up of six criteria, including game results, strength of schedule, game location, scoring margin, net offensive and defensive efficiency, and quality of wins and losses, the NCAA announced in a release.
NET will try and rank teams as accurately as possible based on their entire body of work during the year. To ensure this, game dates have been omitted to give equal importance to match ups both early and late in the season.
A 10-point cap on a team's margin of victory will also be included in the ranking system to prevent giving teams incentive to run up the score to improve their ranking.
"What has been developed is a contemporary method of looking at teams analytically, using results-based and predictive metrics that will assist the Men’s Basketball Committee as it reviews games throughout the season," the NCAA's senior vice president of basketball Dan Gavitt said. "While no perfect rankings exist, using the results of past tournaments will help ensure that the rankings are built on an objective source of truth."
NET is the second change in as many years to how the NCAA determines seeding for March Madness. The quadrant system was introduced last season as a way to rank wins on home, neutral, and away courts as part of a team's resume.
