"They're 6-4 in Quadrant 1." If you watch enough late-season college basketball, a team's whole tournament case gets boiled down to a phrase like that, and almost nobody stops to ask where the quadrants come from. They come from the NET — the NCAA Evaluation Tool — the ranking the selection committee uses to sort men's teams. It's official and it's influential, and it gets misread as a "power ranking" constantly. It isn't one, quite, and the gap between what people think it is and what it actually does is worth a few minutes. Here's how it's built, how the quadrants work, and where I think it earns its keep and where it doesn't.

What the NET replaced, and why

From 1981 through 2018 the NCAA leaned on the RPI, a crude formula that was three-quarters opponents' record. It was easy to game: schedule the right cupcakes and middling teams could inflate their profile. In 2018-19 the NCAA replaced it with the NET, built with help from Google Cloud and reworked since. The goal was a more honest sorting tool — one that values who you beat and how, not just how many.

What goes into the NET

The modern NET blends two ideas:

  • Team Value Index — a results-based measure that credits each game by the quality of the opponent and the location (a road win counts more than the same win at home).
  • Adjusted net efficiency — points scored minus allowed per possession, adjusted for opponent strength and location, with scoring margin capped (around 10 points) so blowing out a bad team by 40 doesn't help more than winning by 12.

Crucially, the NET does not use a team's win-loss record directly, and it doesn't care about the order of games — a November loss and a February loss are weighted the same. It's a season-long body-of-work number, not a momentum tracker.

The quadrant system

The committee rarely talks about a team's NET number itself. It talks about quadrant records, because where the NET matters most is in classifying every game by opponent quality and site. A win over the same team is worth more on the road than at home — so the bands shift by location:

NCAA quadrant definitions by opponent NET rank and game location (men's basketball). Source: NCAA.com.
QuadrantHome (opp. NET)NeutralAway
Quad 11–301–501–75
Quad 231–7551–10076–135
Quad 376–160101–200136–240
Quad 4161–353201–353241–353

This table is the secret decoder ring for bracketology. A "Quad 1 win" — beating a top-30 team at home, a top-50 team on a neutral court, or a top-75 team on the road — is the currency of an at-large bid. A "bad loss" almost always means a Quad 3 or Quad 4 defeat. When you hear a bubble team is "1-7 in Quad 1, 0 bad losses," you now know precisely what that means.

What the NET gets right

  • It rewards scheduling up. Because road and neutral wins over good teams are worth most, the NET nudges teams to play real non-conference games instead of buy games. That's good for the sport.
  • It caps margin. Running up the score doesn't help, which removes an ugly incentive the old systems created.
  • It's location-aware and order-blind. A quality win is a quality win whether it happened in November or February.

What it gets wrong (or gets blamed for)

  • People treat it as a seed list. It isn't. The NET sorts team sheets; humans on the committee still decide. A team's NET rank and its eventual seed often differ by several lines.
  • Quadrant cliffs are arbitrary. An opponent ranked 31st versus 30th can flip a marquee win from Quad 1 to Quad 2 — a discontinuity that can swing a résumé for reasons outside your control, since your opponent's NET keeps moving all season.
  • It blends predictive and results-based ideas. Adjusted efficiency is predictive (how good are you?), while the Team Value Index is results-based (what did you do?). Mixing them means the NET is neither a pure power rating nor a pure résumé — which is why the committee looks at it alongside other metrics, not instead of them.
  • Mid-majors can get squeezed. A great team in a weak league struggles to find Quad 1 chances at all (more on that in our mid-major at-large math piece).

How to read a team sheet like the committee

Skip the single NET number and read the quadrant rows. Strong at-large profiles look like: several Quad 1 wins, a winning or near-even Quad 1-2 record, and no Quad 3-4 losses. Weak ones pile up Quad 2-3 wins that look fine in the standings but carry little weight. The NET isn't a verdict on who's best — it's a consistent way to compare what teams actually did. Used that way, it's the most useful three letters in March.

Sources & further reading

C. B. Zakarian

C. B. Zakarian is an independent analyst who writes about what he can measure: ball sports and the player-run economies inside Roblox. He builds every model, chart, and calculator here himself from public data, shows the working, and never invents a number. When the data can't answer a question, he says so. On CollegeAthleteInsider, that means college football and basketball by the numbers, plus a plain-English read on the NIL-era rules. More about the methodology →