SAN ANTONIO — With the start of the 2024-25 college basketball season just days away, the NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Committee met this week in San Antonio, focusing much of its discussion on how it evaluates teams.
At the meeting Monday and Tuesday in the city set to host its fifth Final Four in April, the committee talked about the conference monitoring program, the NCAA Evaluation Tool and other evaluation metrics, such as the Wins Above Bubble and Torvik ratings that the committee adopted this summer.
“We felt it was important to have the discussion about the NET and the other metrics, not only because the WAB and Torvik are relatively new to the evaluation process, but because we have five new committee members,” said Bubba Cunningham, the director of athletics at North Carolina and the chair of the committee. “It’s unprecedented for this committee to have so many first-year members so it’s important for them to learn best practices for evaluating teams throughout the season, and it’s equally important for all of us to understand the various data points and how to use them.”
The adoption of the Torvik metric gives the committee another predictive model to use, along with KenPom and the Basketball Power Index, while the WAB provides another resume-based metric that shows how many more, or fewer, wins a team has against its schedule versus what a bubble team would expect to have against the same schedule. The WAB metric uses NET as the basis for opponent strength, with the reference “bubble team” being defined as a team ranked 45th in NET, based on a study of recent seasons. Studying past data shows that this NET-based version of WAB correlates strongly with other public versions of WAB, especially by Selection Sunday. Other resume-based metrics the committee has at its disposal include the KPI and Strength of Record.
All seven metrics will be on the team sheets. The team sheets, along with the summary report, will be made to the public each day beginning Dec. 2.
“These two new metrics will add tremendous value to the evaluation process,” Cunningham said. “It’s still about 12 committee members using their individual judgment in evaluating the teams, using the various resources we have but ultimately finding answers to the basic questions of who you played, where did you play, and how did you do.
“Committee members have been concerned about how best to evaluate and emphasize a team’s strength of schedule and results, especially nonconference. We believe that the WAB will be an important tool to help objectively see the value of each win and loss. Whether it’s a nonconference or conference game, whether you win by a single point or by 30, the WAB is going to tell us a lot about what you did against the schedule you played. We’re looking forward to implementing that into the process.”
The committee also received updates from representatives from TNT Sports and CBS and discussed several tournament operations and ticketing issues and officiating matters, including details of the referee push-to-talk microphone technology that was adopted this summer to better communicate results of video reviews to broadcast viewers and in-venue fans.
The five first-year committee members include Irma Garcia of Manhattan, Stu Jackson of the West Coast Conference, Zack Lassiter of Abilene Christian, Lee Reed of Georgetown and Chad Weiberg of Oklahoma State. Sun Belt Conference Commissioner Keith Gill will serve as vice chair this year, while other returning members include Greg Byrne of Alabama, Mark Coyle of Minnesota, Arthur Johnson of Temple, Martin Newton of Samford and Tom Wistrcill of the Big Sky Conference.
