Selection panel’s new math adds up

The Kansas Jayhawks entered the postseason with their wings clipped. Having lost two stars midseason — one to an NCAA suspension, one to unspecified personal matters — they could well sustain double-digit losses for only the second time in 19 seasons.

Yet according to the Rating Percentage Index statistic, which typically saturates bracketological prognostications ahead of the NCAA Tournament’s Selection Sunday reveal, Kansas was, as of Friday morning, the top-ranked men’s basketball team in the country — higher than Kentucky, which beat Kansas handily in January; higher than Virginia, which had zero losses to teams not named Duke; higher even than Duke and its basketball messiah, Zion Williamson.

So should you start penciling Kansas in as one of the four No. 1 seeds before the bracket is released Sunday night?

Not so fast. While you can still find websites that calculate RPI, the statistic is officially no more in the men’s game. The NCAA, which created it nearly four decades ago, disowned it in the statistic’s most prominent sport last year.

“We as a committee have decided the RPI is kind of yesterday’s news,” this season’s selection committee chairman, Bernard Muir, the athletic director at Stanford, said last month.

The RPI’s replacement as the first-among-equals rating, the NCAA Evaluation Tool, put Kansas at No. 21 on Friday. It is a shockingly large divergence that much more closely matches the No. 4 seed Kansas is generally expected to receive after the committee considers not only NET but other advanced stats, winning percentages, individual game results and even the eyeball test.

As Kansas shows, we are not in RPI-land anymore. And it is difficult to find close observers of college basketball who do not think this is a good thing.

“By and large, eyeballing it, it has been better than the RPI at measuring good versus bad teams,” ESPN tournament analyst Joe Lunardi said of the NET.

More subtle but at least as important, moving from RPI to NET — even the acronym seems an improvement! — may have heralded a shift in the selection committee’s philosophical underpinnings. (The selection committee for the Division I women’s tournament will still use the RPI.)

Every year, there is a long, loud debate when it comes to selecting the at-large bids — the teams that do not receive automatic tournament slots by virtue of winning their conference tournament championships. The fundamental question is: In sifting the candidates, should the committee pick on the basis of who is “most deserving,” which is to say the teams that had the better seasons to that point, or

simply pick the “best,” which is to say the teams that gave other indications of overall quality?

RPI, which essentially measured only won-lost record and strength of schedule, was a tool for “most deserving.” NET, which combines those RPI-like inputs with efficiency ratings and margins of victory, is an argument for “best.”

Joel Sokol, a Georgia Tech professor of engineering who compiles a college basketball rating known as LRMC, noted that NET has more closely tracked other ratings, including his own and KenPom’s rating, which measures offensive and defensive efficiency per possession, adjusted for opponent strength.

“It’s a lot better than the RPI, a lot more reflective of how good the teams are,” Sokol said.

Stanford’s Muir, who has served for several years on the selection committee that picks and then seeds the final NCAA men’s field of 68 teams, called NET “contemporary.”

“We’re quite pleased with how the new metric is working,” he said last month, adding: “There’s a thousand possessions that occur over the course of a year. Coming down to one possession is not going to adjust your NET that significantly.”

By contrast, the RPI really could be affected by a single possession. It was a good-faith attempt to do two things: situate teams’ records in the context of their strength of schedule, and discourage teams from running up the score. But this meant that a single bad (if close) loss or good (if close) victory could disproportionately sway a team’s rating.

And the RPI’s myopic focus encouraged teams simply to schedule good opponents, or have the good fortune, shared only by major-conference teams, of facing many good opponents in league play. Worse, by not accounting for home-court advantage — in a sport in which the home team wins nearly two in three games — RPI boosted teams that could afford to schedule more nonconference home games, which, again, tended to be major-conference teams.

“Depending upon the amount of money and support you have and your arena, you can basically isolate yourself from the rest of the world or at least control who you play and when you play them and where you play them,” said Doug Fullerton, who served on the selection committee when he was Big Sky Conference commissioner. “It’s a have and havenot situation.

Meanwhile, discouraging blowouts meant ignoring margin of victory, which sports analysts for decades have generally said is a better predictor of future winning percentage.