The NCAA Tournament Selection Committee gave college basketball fans a preview of what the top seeds in the NCAA Tournament would look like, releasing their top 16 teams on Saturday.



Those teams — led by No. 1 seeds Duke, Tennessee, Virginia and Gonzaga — were each given a seed, ranked from 1-through-16 and each assigned a region to provide a realistic look at the seed arrangement process when planning out the field for March Madness.

Last year’s rankings were a pretty strong indicator of the NCAA Tournament field: The committee nailed three of the four No. 1 seeds and 13 of the 16 top seeds overall. The lone No. 1 seed miss was Kansas, which was a No. 2 and moved up to a No. 1 seed. And two of the three teams that missed barely did so, falling to No. 5 seeds. The lone major outlier was Oklahoma, which fell apart down the stretch.



This was also the first time college basketball fans and media members have been able to see the impact of the new NCAA Evaluation Tool (NET) formula as it relates to seeding teams for the NCAA Tournament.

The NCAA described the NET in its initial release on the formula.

“The NCAA Evaluation Tool, which will be known as the NET, relies on game results, strength of schedule, game location, scoring margin, net offensive and defensive efficiency, and the quality of wins and losses,” the NCAA noted, through its release on the formula. “To make sense of team performance data, late-season games (including from the NCAA tournament) were used as test sets to develop a ranking model leveraging machine learning techniques. The model, which used team performance data to predict the outcome of games in test sets, was optimized until it was as accurate as possible. The resulting model is the one that will be used as the NET going forward.”

Early returns have been that the margin of victory component may be a bit heavy-handed, as a team that wins a game by, say, 25 points will have its margin of victory capped at 10 points, but will still essentially get full credit for the blowout via its efficiency numbers (a team that wins by 25 is bound to have strong efficiency numbers).

The NET is supposed to be used largely to determine the quality of wins — which ones fall into Quadrant 1 wins, Quadrant 2, respectively — but it will be interesting once the whole field is picked to go back and see just how much those selections align with NET’s rankings.

It’s hard to answer that question without the full field, but here were the top teams in college basketball as ranked by the NCAA Tournament Selection Committee:



SOUTH

1. Tennessee (No. 2 overall)

2. North Carolina (7)

3. Purdue (9)

4. Nevada (14)

EAST

1. Duke (1)

2. Michigan (6)

3. Marquette (12)

4. Iowa State (13)

MIDWEST

1. Virginia (3)

2. Kentucky (5)

3. Houston (11)

4. Wisconsin (16)

WEST

1. Gonzaga (4)

2. Michigan State (8)

3. Kansas (10)

4. Louisville (15)