The Ohio State Buckeyes are the first team to be ranked No. 1 in the history of the NCAA Evaluation Tool (NET).

The NCAA's new metric, which completely replaces the RPI, debuted Monday. The NET will be more than just a highly publicized and debated ranking of all 353 D-I men's teams; it will also be the sorting tool that's used on official team sheets to illustrate strength of schedule, quality of wins and losses, and will group the incipient quadrant system. Team sheets are constantly referenced and weighted against each other by selection committee members as they debate teams for selection and seeding in the NCAA Tournament's field of 68.

Monday's reveal has the 6-0 Buckeyes leading the way, followed by Virginia, Texas Tech, Michigan and Gonzaga.

The release of the NET rankings comes 20 days into the season and on the precipice of a lot of significant games this week. The rankings from here on out will be available to the public and will update daily. While the NET will surely get the most discussion of any analytic ranking (given it's officially linked to the NCAA), it is also important to remember that it is not the be-all and end-all of rankings/metrics. It is only one system. It's an important one, and now the most prominent one, but the NCAA will continue to have many of the most mainstream and cited advanced metrics also published on team sheets (KenPom, the Sagarin Ratings, KPI, and ESPN's pair of analytics: BPI and Strength of Record).

And in case you're wondering: What is the NET?

In short, it is a blend of results-based statistics and predictive algorithms. Ultimately, that means the NET is predictive in nature; the introduction to any elements of forecasting intrinsically makes a model predictive. That's a good thing for college basketball and the selection committee. (For a deeper what-to-know about the NET, how it came to be and what it aims to do, you'll want to read this).

"It's a complete replacement (of the RPI)," senior vice president of NCAA men's basketball Dan Gavitt told CBS Sports over the summer. "This metric, we are very confident it achieves what our intention was, and what the recommendation was from the NABC. It's a composite ranking from the standpoint that it's got a very significant foundation based of being results-oriented, because that is so important, we believe, to committee and coaches in the selection and seeding process. It has some levels of predictiveness to it now that the RPI never did."

It's a modification in the team and resume evaluation process. The NCAA put out this graphic to show how the NET's rankings are built.

"There was no goal or intent, in any way with any segment of the game, to benefit or not, populations of teams," Gavitt said. "That goes both ways. We're trying to create something that is as fair as possible at every level of the the game. First and foremost, results of the games [matter most]. There was no intent, one way or the other. We're comfortable and confident that this is a fair and equitable metric for the entire game."

But the NET does have some potential foibles. First, the efficiency component doesn't appear to consider quality of opponent on a team's schedule. So within that, a team's efficiency numbers could theoretically vault or tumble its ranking in the NET. It's a potential loophole for the 10-point cap on scoring margin.

Another lingering issue is adjusted winning percentage, which seems to have overlap in the overall formula. Teams are getting double credit for its wins and losses, and taking some of the data accrued in the team value index's criteria. There is also the issue of the 1.4/1.0/0.6 weighted values and how those can't possibly represent difficulty depending on specific venues (specifically on the road). Bringing even more concern into adjusted winning percentage is the fact that quality of opponent isn't accounted for.

So, for example, if one team is 1-1 with a road win and a home loss, the NCAA's math says they've played 2.8 "adjusted" games. Yet if a 1-1 team has it flipped, with a home win and a road loss, it's 1.2 "adjusted" games played. In reality, those teams each played two games but are not getting evaluated as though they did. If you are an above-.500 team, the combination of winning on the road and losing at home can actually be detrimental -- which goes against the committee's renewed philosophy of rewarding road performance.

These kinds of inconsistencies in the overall algorithm will be what critics point to when certain teams inevitably wind up higher or lower than most expect.

But overall, it's a step forward. And it's critical to be patient as the rankings evolve daily, weekly, monthly. What we see now is going to be drastically different from what the NET looks like in March.

NCAA NET rankings