IBM introduced the first personal computer, complete with its own floppy disk drive, in 1981. That was a few months after the NCAA brought the RPI to college basketball. Yes, there was a time when college basketball had a cutting-edge tool to help select tournament teams. But as floppy disks gave way to flash drives and now, the cloud, the RPI persisted.



Thankfully, the NCAA changed that last week with its announcement that the men’s basketball committee will no longer use the RPI. In its place, the NCAA Evaluation Tool (NET) will be used to organize the data on the team sheets that committee members rely on for reference. According to the NCAA’s release, the system “relies on game results, strength of schedule, game location, scoring margin, net offensive and defensive efficiency, and the quality of wins and losses.”



Some of that sounds like RPI-speak, but the scoring margin and net efficiency measures add another layer of information that...