Syracuse, N.Y. -- We are days away from the moment on the college basketball calendar that separates which teams will keep playing after the conference tournaments conclude and which teams experience the finality of their last 2018-19 game.

This year, with the introduction of the NCAA Evaluation Tool, or NET, predicting the NCAA Tournament field has been an interesting, experimental exercise. Nobody knows exactly how the NET is valuing college basketball teams. Insiders have extracted some intelligence, are making their best guesses and putting them in their bracketology projections.

Last month, the NCAA unveiled its mid-season “bracket reveal." That exercise provided bracketologists and vested observers with a window into the workings of the way the NCAA will select its postseason field.

“We don’t really know how they’re going to use the NET because they’ve never used it before,” said Brian Bennett of The Athletic. “I do think the bracket reveal gave us some idea. They didn’t exactly hew to the NET, which I thought was interesting. I think Houston was higher and some other teams were seeded higher than what they were in the NET. So that told me they were going to take other things into consideration.”

The NET is new, it’s a bit mysterious and it has generated plenty of thoughts and concerns.

We’re here to break it down.

Background

The difference between the RPI and the NET

The RPI, previously the key metric for picking NCAA Tournament-worthy teams, relied heavily on scheduling. That metric was very interested in the difficulty of a team’s schedule, the results of those games and the results of the opponents’ games. How a team played in those games -- its efficiency on offense and defense -- was not a factor.

In recent years, the NCAA has supplemented its RPI-based selection and seeding with forward-thinking websites like Kenpom.com, which not only considers performance data for each team but predicts how those teams will play in successive games based on that data.

The NET is supposed to be a step in the direction of predictive websites like Kenpom. This is how the NCAA defines it:

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.

Based on what they’ve seen so far, experts who have picked and seeded the NCAA Tournament fields over the years believe the new NET system to be better than its RPI-based predecessor.

“I think the idea is they’re using a better metric, or what they believe to be a better metric, and it almost certainly is a better metric,” said Patrick Stevens, a longtime bracketologist. “There certainly is more nuance to it. At the same time, it’s not perfect.”

“I think that what the NET is is a power ranking,” ESPN’s John Gasaway said. “There was an interesting comment made on the NCAA site, and I’m not sure if this has been said before, but this is very much in sync with what I’ve seen: What the NET is after is it’s predicting neutral floor postseason success.”

How do the quadrants help?

The NCAA used quadrants last year. But those quadrants were based on RPI. This year, they’re based on the NET.

After every game, each Division I basketball team gets put under the NET microscope and is then computer-ranked against its peers. The NCAA takes those NET rankings, breaks them into specific groupings and arrives at conclusions about a team’s worth.

Here’s how the NCAA breaks down each quadrant:

Quadrant 1: Home 1-30, Neutral 1-50, Away 1-75

Quadrant 2: Home 31-75, Neutral 51-100, Away 76-135

Quadrant 3: Home 76-160, Neutral 101-200, Away 135-240

Quadrant 4: Home 161-353, Neutral 201-353, Away 241-353

To provide concrete context, consider this: Syracuse is currently ranked 42 in the NET. It plays Clemson, with a 39 NET, on the road this weekend. That is a Quad 1 game for Syracuse (Away 1-75) and a Quad 2 game for Clemson (home 31-75).

NET quirks

The North Carolina State factor

This is the NCAA's team sheet for NC State as of midafternoon on March 5, 2019.

No team in college basketball this season has faced as much curious scrutiny as N.C. State. The Wolfpack has a NET of 31 right now. It is 2-8 in Quadrant 1 games and a whopping 10-0 in Quadrant 4 games. (Syracuse, by comparison, has played four Quad 4 opponents.) N.C. State’s non-conference schedule ranks 353. It beat up on Mount St. Mary’s, Maryland Eastern Shore, UNC Asheville, Maine and USC Upstate -- all of which rank in the 300s.

In the old RPI system, N.C. State would have sunk beneath the weight of its awful schedule. But here, in NET land, it is considered a near-lock to make the NCAA Tournament field.

“Obviously, in the case of a team like North Carolina State, I do think it’s true they would be nowhere near the discussion if this were a year ago,” Gasaway said. “I don’t usually look at team RPIs, but I did in preparation for this. And for North Carolina State, it’s still in the 80s. (It’s now 92.) In the years (the NCAA was) using it, they never let in a major conference team with an RPI higher than the 60s. That story has been pointed out and it’s a big deal. I mean, North Carolina State is going to be in the tournament and last year they would not have been.”

How the NCAA selection committee deals with N.C. State is one of the more intriguing NET storylines going forward.

“I think it’s going to depend on what kind of seed they get,” Bennett said. “I still think the committee might punish them a little bit when it’s all said and done. We’ve just seen the committee do that over and over again. Strength of schedule always gets teams seeded a little lower than what you thought going in. If we come out on Selection Sunday and they’re a six seed or something like that, then we’ll know they’re taking the NET really seriously. But if they’re at a 10, that probably works out alright. Strength of schedule has always been a pretty major component of this.”

The way the committee ultimately treats N.C. State will be interesting for another, more basic reason: Will rewarding the Wolfpack with a high seed convince college coaches to schedule weaker teams in the future?

“You’ve touched on my main thing,” Gasaway said. "I think selection and seeding will go just fine. My reservation is what happens next year in terms of scheduling.

“N.C. State, for whatever reason, chose to play a lot of cupcakes in the non-conference part of their season. They did a really good job against the cupcakes. And that is actually a good indicator of strong teams. If you beat everybody by 20 points, you probably are pretty good. But I would hate if coaches were to say, ‘Let’s just schedule cupcakes, that will help our NET.’”

Scoring margin

Scoring margin has created a stir in some quarters. The NET considers the score differential in games, though it caps the number at 10 to discourage teams from running up the score.

Some coaches, it seems, have been paying particular attention to how much their teams win and lose by, the most notable practitioners being Virginia Tech’s Buzz Williams and Nevada’s Eric Musselman.

According to news reports, Williams called a timeout down 11 with 21 seconds left in the Hokies’ game against Louisville. After that timeout, the Hokies got a 3-pointer to fall and lost 72-64.

“According to all the research I’ve found, if you win by 10 or more, that helps,” Williams told reporters then. “If you lose by 10 or more, that hurts. So 21 seconds left, you’ll see a lot of that. It’s been going on. I think it’s just now kind of coming to the surface. ... The basket at the end, it was in a losing effort, but decimal points maybe it matters even though we don’t know the formula. But some of the smart people are hinting that it does matter.”

Not everybody is trying to game the NET. Jim Boeheim, Mike Krzyzewski and Roy Williams have all said at various points this season that they have no idea what the NET is or what it measures. But other coaches are plenty aware of what the NET purports to care about.

“Nevada has been notorious about that,” Bennett said. “They keep their starters in late. They try to run offense in the last minute. Not necessarily because they want to win by a higher margin, but because they want to keep that points per possession up. That sort of thing helps them in Kenpom. We don’t know what the efficiency ratings are in NET, but we gotta assume they’re pretty close to Kenpom.”

NCAA Tournament spokesmen have subsequently said they don’t believe scoring margin will move the needle as much as people might believe. But nobody’s certain.

“It’s not making a difference right now,” Gasaway said. “The NET as it’s currently used -- and we don’t know because nobody has popped open the hood on it and we will not be allowed to see it -- but it’s very much a power ranking with elements of strength of record and resume metrics built into it. It’s very much more akin to Kenpom, it’s closer to BPI, to strength of record -- which is how good your resume is based on your schedule. The 10-point margin is not really coming into play.”

Bottom line

Nobody knows for sure how the NET will affect the selection of NCAA Tournament teams or the way those teams will be seeded until Selection Sunday. The NCAA still will consider metrics from websites like kenpom, KPI, Sagarin and ESPN’s strength of record. Those numbers are located at the top of each team sheet.

Bennett used Kansas as an example of the way the NET might better indicate a team’s success than the RPI did. Kansas, with its 22-7 record, is No. 1 in the RPI right now. It is No. 16 in NET, “which is closer to where they’re playing right now."

“I’m encouraged by what I’m seeing,” Gasaway said, “and I definitely like that the NET is measuring basketball performance in addition to the two things that the RPI measured, which was wins and your strength of schedule.”

This is SU’s team sheet, as of Tuesday afternoon (these things change on a daily basis):