INDIANAPOLIS — The NCAA Division I Women’s Basketball Committee announced that beginning with the upcoming 2020-21 season, the NCAA Evaluation Tool will replace the Ratings Percentage Index as the contemporary sorting tool used to measure a team’s quality and help evaluate team resumes for selection and seeding in the Division I Women’s Basketball Championship.
“It’s an exciting time for the game as we look to the future,” said Nina King, senior deputy athletics director and chief of staff at Duke, who will be chair of the Division I Women’s Basketball Committee in the 2020-21 academic year. “We felt after much analysis that the women’s basketball NET, which will be determined by who you played, where you played, how efficiently you played and the result of the game, is a more accurate tool and should be used by the committee going forward.”
The use of the women’s basketball NET was approved after a lengthy evaluation process, which included a comprehensive assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the men’s basketball NET that has been used by the Division I Men’s Basketball Committee as a sorting tool since the 2018-19 season. After an analysis of women’s basketball statistical data over a 10-year period by a team from Google Cloud Professional Services, the Division I Women’s Basketball Committee concluded the NET algorithm built exclusively for women’s basketball was an optimal ranking tool and should be used beginning with the coming season.