In advance of the Division I Women’s Basketball Committee releasing the NCAA tournament bracket for March Madness, we want to make sure you understand what they’ll be discussing in the selection room.
The DI Women’s Basketball Committee uses a list of 12 criteria:
- Bad Losses
- Common Opponents
- Competitive in Losses
- Early Performance Versus Late Performance
- Head-To-Head
- Observable Component
- Overall Record
- Regional Rankings
- Significant Wins
- Strength of Schedule
And then the final two criteria are metrics: NCAA Evaluation Tool, also known as NET, which the committee has been using since the 2021 championship, and — new this year — Wins Above Bubble, or WAB.
The NET is a predictive tool based on whom you played, where you played, how efficiently you played and the result of the game. In four of the five years since the NET was introduced, the team ranked No. 1 on Selection Sunday has gone on to win the national championship.
WAB was added this season to complement the NET metric. It does not factor in margin of wins or losses or a team’s efficiency — it only measures the quality of your resume based on the results. WAB is results-based and goes beyond strength of schedule to show how a team actually did against that schedule. Each game's result is assigned a value between 1 and -1, and that cumulative total determines a team’s ranking.
, WAB shows how many more or fewer wins a team has compared to what a bubble team would average against that same schedule. The WAB uses the NET as the basis for opponent strength, , based on a study of recent women's basketball seasons.
A lot can change between now and Selection Sunday, and it’s important to remember that these two metrics are just part of the criteria the committee will be using when making their decisions.
