I feel the need for a caveat at the beginning of this piece: I’m well aware that the NCAA’s NET Rankings in mid-February will not determine what line the Wisconsin Badgers are on in March. But they are a good guidepost for what the Committee thinks about Wisconsin right now, and that’s relevant.
Greg Gard’s squad currently sits at No. 33 in the NET rankings, which, to be blunt, seems low for two main reasons.
Wisconsin has been objectively better than some teams above them
I’m not going into a comparative
analysis for every head-to-head gripe I have here, but one team from the Big Ten is a good example that I’ll lean on.
We need look no further than Iowa who, relative to Wisconsin, has the same overall record, inferior conference record, worse performance in both Q1 and Q2 games, zero top 30 NET wins, and an easier strength of schedule, yet preposterously sits at No. 27 in the NET, a full six spots (and TWO seed lines, 7th vs 9th) ahead of the Badgers.
In addition, Iowa has two bad losses: one to NET No. 86 Minnesota and another to NET No. 151 Maryland (!). Wisconsin’s worst losses are to NET No. 48 USC and NET No. 45 TCU. Spot the difference yet?
The Badgers have a robust troika of massive wins that Iowa can’t come close to sniffing (more on this in a moment), and zero bad losses, so there is really no way to explain why Iowa is ahead of Wisconsin in the NET beyond some weird built-in bias.
No team has a better package of elite wins than Wisconsin
While many college basketball teams have won big games this season, none have a better troika (@ Illinois, @ Michigan, Michigan State blowout) than Wisconsin does. Michigan and Illinois alone are each top seven NET teams (No. 1 and No. 5), and the Badgers beat both of them in their barns. That’s objectively unreal work for Gard’s crew.
Layer on a wire-to-wire home bludgeoning of Tom Izzo’s Spartans (now No. 15 in the NET but then No. 12), and Wisconsin has a handful of massive wins that nobody else can match. Not just the teams around them in the NET, but nobody in NCAA Basketball.
Yet they still sit at No. 33, behind Iowa and a mere one slot ahead of Indiana, a team Wisconsin “lost” to, but who is 17-9, 2.5 games behind Wisconsin in the Big Ten, and just got blown out by the same Illinois unit Wisconsin beat just six days ago. This looks even sillier when you see that Wisconsin is 9-7 in Q1 + Q2 and Indiana is 4-9. A joke, really.
Hopefully, the Badgers will keep their foot on the gas and force the NET to keep elevating them in both an absolute sense and also relative to the teams they’ve objectively been better than. Wisconsin hosts Iowa this weekend with a chance to force the NET’s hand a bit on this.
