Marquette’s looking pretty good, the rest of the Big East…. not so much
On Monday, with four full weeks of basketball action in the books, the NCAA debuted the first edition of the 2024-25 NET rankings for men’s basketball. They did the same for women’s basketball as well, mind you, but we’ve got some follow up work to do here at Anonymous Eagle on the men’s basketball side of things.
You may remember when, two days into the season, I wrote about the fact that there were a surprising number of Big East teams not doing themselves any favors against what appeared to be overmatched teams on paper. There were a number of Big East squads that seemed particularly bothered by getting left out of the NCAA tournament last season, but the facts of their resume kinda made it obvious that they shouldn’t be in the 2024 field of 68. Starting off this season slow — up to and including Villanova losing at home to Columbia — was certainly no way to argue your case after the fact, that’s for sure.
And now another month has gone by, and the NCAA has officially started to measure all 364 teams, everyone from #1 Tennessee down to #364 Mississippi Valley State. We know exactly where everyone stands in the eyes of the most important computer rankings when it comes to NCAA tournament selection. No saying KenPom.com has too much preseason bias still baked in, no using BartTorvik.com’s filtering system to only look at results. Andrei over at Paint Touches did an incredible job sifting through a lot of that data over this past weekend, and you should go check it out as a companion piece for what I’m about to say. Now, in this moment, the NET is what the NET says it is, and there’s no debate about what it says.
And this is what it says for the Big East right now:
Marquette: #7
UConn: #39
St. John’s: #42
Butler: #47
DePaul: #63
Villanova: #92
Creighton: #99
Xavier: #103
Providence: #104
Georgetown: #128
Seton Hall: #200
By my math, that breaks down like this if the NCAA was doing a selection process today based entirely on the NET rankings:
- 1 team (Marquette) that’s obviously in and earning a protected top 4 seed, and it ain’t a #4.
- 3 teams (UConn, St. John’s, and Butler) that at least have a case to be in the tournament with a top 50 ranking, but with 31 automatic bids and 37 at-large bids, only the team in the top 40 can truly feel safely in.
- 1 team (DePaul) that’s just excited to be in the top 75 and doesn’t really care about anything else
- 1 team (Villanova) that’s probably lucky to be in the top 100
- 1 team (Creighton) that’s essentially saying “OH MY GOD WE’RE NOT EVEN TOP 100” even though they actually are but emotionally they are not.
- 3 teams (Xavier, Providence, and Georgetown) that are completely screwed by sitting outside the top 100
- 1 team (Seton Hall) that is probably going to be a dead weight anchor on the entire league all season long…. but at least they’re not the worst power conference team! (hi, #233 Virginia Tech!)
So that’s where everyone stands right now. It’s probably not great for …. well, I was going to say for a lot of teams, but it’s kind of not great for everyone who’s not Marquette right now. I know, I know, there’s a lot of season left to go, and some teams haven’t even really started playing anyone worth mentioning yet. DePaul, for example, has built their #63 ranking entirely on the back of thumping six of the seven sub-200 teams that they’ve played. Thankfully for them, the one team that they did not thump is currently their toughest opponent they’ve played. As we transition into the meat of the college basketball schedule — which really starts this week with the Big East/Big 12 Battle — teams are going to have lots of opportunities to shift things around a bit.
But is that actually possible? What did things look like when the NET debuted last season, and how did that maybe affect where things ended up in March when it came time to build a bracket?
I hit the Wayback Machine to answer that exact question. Here’s the Big East sorted by their NET ranking on December 3, 2023, the first rankings of last season. I’ll note the ranking at that point, and then what it looked like on Selection Sunday.
Creighton
Debut: #4
Selection Sunday: #11
Change: -7
UConn
Debut: #9
Selection Sunday: #2
Change: +7
Marquette
Debut: #10
Selection Sunday: #14
Change: -4
Butler
Debut: #38
Selection Sunday: #68
Change: -30, dropped from tournament contention
Villanova
Debut: #50
Selection Sunday: #41
Change: +9 after drifting up to #55 in December and #51 in early February; too little, too late
Providence
Debut: #61
Selection Sunday: #58
Change: +3, not enough for tournament contention
Xavier
Debut: #68
Selection Sunday: #64
Change: +4, never in tournament contention
St. John’s
Debut: #75
Selection Sunday: #32
Change: +43, too little, too late after a NET of #50 on February 23
Seton Hall
Debut: #81
Selection Sunday: #67
Change: +14, not enough for tournament contention
Georgetown
Debut: #221
Selection Sunday: #205
Change: +16
DePaul
Debut: #267
Selection Sunday: #320
Change: -53, somehow
Fact of the matter in the Big East is that if you weren’t a top 10 team on the day the NET debuted last season, you didn’t make the NCAA tournament. Now, every year is different so that’s almost assuredly not going to hold again when we get to March 2025. But at this time a year ago, Providence, St. John’s, and Seton Hall all did not look like NCAA tournament teams and then tried to pretend that they were horribly cheated and ripped off by not making the tournament three months later. To put it another way: No one who was at #50 or lower figured out a way to play their way into the tournament……… and right now, seven teams in the Big East are below #60, much less #50.
The NCAA selection committee likes to say that every game counts. To a certain extent, we all handwave that away and say “yeah, okay, sure, got it” like we’re a Jennifer Lawrence GIF. But there’s truth to it, because you can’t just lollygag your way through the first month of the season and then just magically rescue it over the next three months. Right now, Creighton and Xavier, two teams that were in last week’s AP top 25 poll, are worse off in the NET than St. John’s was at this point last season, and the Red Storm didn’t come anywhere close to the NCAA tournament even with their late season surge. They’re worse off than Seton Hall was at this point a year ago, and that was a Pirates team that started Big East play 6-1 with wins over UConn and Marquette and still couldn’t get themselves into the NCAA tournament.
You might be saying, “But Andy, I am an attractive and intelligent Marquette fan, this doesn’t affect me, other than getting to think my team has a chance to win a lot of games this season!” And you’re not wrong to think that. I’m the guy who picked Marquette to go 28-3 this season when Paint Touches organized a game-by-game prediction spreadsheet amongst us MU internet weirdos, so I’m right there with you, perhaps even feeling validated by the NET telling me that my predictions are looking pretty great right now.
But.
Last year, Marquette played 10 Quadrant 1 games in regular season Big East competition.
Right now, Marquette projects to play four Quadrant 1 games in regular season Big East competition.
Maybe it moves, maybe teams solve their problems, maybe I’m pressing the alarm button for something that won’t matter all that much three months from now. I’m willing to say I could be very wrong here.
But at this time last year, Marquette was projected to play nine Quadrant 1 games in regular season Big East competition. Four is less than that. Is it harder to get a #2 seed for a third straight year when you play less than half as many Q1 games? Sure is, I’ll tell you that much for certain.