Cal WBB: Stanford, Bracketology, a NET primer, and UNC preview

After sweeping Stanford, Cal will close out January basketball at home against top 25 North Carolina as March basketball beckons

photo via @calwbball instagram

Quick Stanford thoughts

Hey, did you know that Cal women’s basketball swept Stanford? In many ways, I’m not sure if I’ve fully wrapped my head around it.

After the joyful romp that was Cal’s early season home win over Stanford, I didn’t enter the road game expecting anything nearly that easy, so it was with some amount of shock that I watched Cal build an 19 point second half lead.

It felt much more sickeningly familiar to watch as Stanford erased 17 points out of that 19 point lead. Did I ENJOY watching a slow motion nightmare flash before my eyes as I imagined Cal blowing a huge lead and the chance to sweep Stanford in one fell swoop? No, it was miserable.

But it was appropriate. Game 1 against Stanford was too easy. Thursday’s game, miserable as the final 15 minutes were, was exactly the kind of suffering we all needed to experience to be able to flush the pain of the 40 years Tara Vanderveer inflicted on us all. A psychic exorcism equal parts painful and cathartic.

Maybe this season will just be a blip and Stanford WBB will go right back to being an elite WBB team that rarely loses. I think it’s more likely we’ll look back on this season a a sea-change moment in the history of this rivalry.

Bracketology Update

ESPN projects Cal as a 6 seed and is giving us a healthy dose of Texas basketball:

The Athletic ($) projects Cal as a five seed and a trip to Oklahoma:

HerHoopStats predicts a six seed, and also wants to send Cal to Oklahoma, but offers up an intriguing matchup either against former Pac-12 foe Washington or Iowa State and Audi Crooks:

NCAA.com has some weird formatting, but also projects Cal for a 6 seed playing in Kansas State, with a first round game against #11 seed Iowa (sans Caitlin Clark, phew).

The consensus is clear - Cal is a 5/6 seed, and thus has a chance to rise to a 4 seed or better and thus host first round tournament games if the Bears can do what they need to boost their tournament resume.

Which means we need to . . .

Understanding the NET rankings

It has been six and eight years respectively since Cal WBB and MBB have last made the NCAA tournament. Those years both predate the introduction of the Net Evaluation Tool, which has replaced the Ratings Percentage Index (RPI) as the most important ranking system to determine who gets into the NCAA tournament, and what seed they receive in the tournament.

Because Cal hasn’t been good enough to be seriously considered for the tournament, I (and presumably most other Cal fans) haven’t made a point to learn or understand what the NET is or how it works in practice.

But suddenly, joyfully, the NET rankings matter very much for Cal WBB this year with the Bears, plus some consternation. When Cal beat Florida State, Cal fell a spot in the NET rankings. When Cal beat Stanford last Thursday, Cal fell another spot. As of Sunday, Cal ranks only 35th in the NET rankings, despite consistently ranking in the top 25 in the human polls. Why does the system hate Cal?!

Let’s start by trying to understand the NET. Here’s the NCAA’s own explanation for how the NET is calculated:

The remaining factors include the Team Value Index (TVI), which is a result-based feature that rewards teams for beating quality opponents, particularly away from home, as well as an adjusted net efficiency rating. The adjusted efficiency is a team’s net efficiency, adjusted for strength of opponent and location (home/away/neutral) across all games played.

This is pretty opaque, as there is no particular explanation for how TVI is calculated or how strength of schedule adjustments are made. But I think the quickie summary is that the NET is more or less very similar to a Kenpom or Torvik system that ranks teams based on their net offensive and defensive efficiency, adjusted to strength of schedule.

And the Torvik system as of Sunday ranks Cal #32, roughly in line with the NET rankings. No system is perfect, but generally speaking net efficiency projections like Kenpom (who doesn’t do WBB) and Torvik are pretty accurate in the aggregate. So why does Cal WBB not rank that highly?

In short, because of a handful of meh performances. Cal didn’t blow out a Grambling State team that ranks towards the bottom of the NET and played a too-close game against a nationally average UOP team, and two of Cal’s three losses were bad either because the team Cal was playing wasn’t that good (Clemson) or because of the magnitude of the defeat (Duke).

Are these defects seemingly minor? I’d certainly say so! But women’s basketball is very top heavy, so even nit-picky things like not winning by a lot against bad teams can lower your NET ranking.

But here’s the thing: I don’t think Cal’s NET ranking much matters. That’s because what the committee looks at are your NET quadrant records. As a reminder, here is how WBB defines games by quadrant:

• Quadrant one (games at home vs NET 1-25, games at neutral sites vs NET 1-35 and games on the road vs NET 1-45);

• Quadrant two (home 26-55, neutral 36-65 and away 46-80);

• Quadrant three (home 56-90, neutral 66-105 and away 81-130)

• Quadrant four (home 91-plus, neutral 106-plus and away 131-plus)

Now consider: here is last year’s top 50 in the NET, and the NCAA seed that the team subsequently received:

You will notice that the committee doesn’t just seed teams based on their absolute NET ranking. Let’s consider a couple of examples

USC (NET 10, #1 seed) vs. Utah (NET 11, #5 seed)

USC went 29-6, Utah went 21-11. USC went 14-5 against Quad 1; Utah went 8-10 against Quad 1.

So why did the NET rank both teams next to each other? Utah had a very high efficiency rating and thus a high NET rating because they blew teams out (37 point win over Cal, 20 point win over USC, various blowouts over bad non-con teams) and lost close games to really good teams (Baylor, South Carolina, Arizona, Stanford, UCLA). USC, meanwhile, went 12-4 in games decided by 10 points or less. In other words, Utah and USC were about as good, but USC was better about winning close games.

The committee, with the goal of rewarding teams for winning games, recognized that fact and gave USC a 1 seed and Utah a 5.

Penn State (NET 27, no NCAA bid) vs. Oklahoma (NET 28, #5 seed)

Here’s a STARK difference. One team finishes a spot higher in the NET and doesn’t even get into the tournament, while the team they finished above gets a FIVE seed? What gives?

Good wins, that’s what gives. Oklahoma went 9-9 in Quad 1 games and 8-0 in Quad 2 games. Penn State went 3-9 in Quad 1 games and 8-4 in Quad 2 games. Penn State got a high NET ranking by losing a bunch of close games against good teams, but when it came time for the committee to decide, Penn State’s ability to keep games close didn’t hold up compared to their inability to earn good wins.

What does it mean for Cal?

Right now, the bracketologists mentioned above have Cal in the 5/6 seed range, even though the NET rankings would suggest Cal should be a 9 seed. And that’s because bracketologists understand how the committee creates their rankings, and they can see what everybody else can see. Here is a list of every team with 4 or more Quad 1 wins (through games on Saturday, 1/26):

South Carolina (9-1 record in Quad 1 games)
Texas (7-2)
UCLA (5-0)
USC (5-1)
Notre Dame (5-2)
Duke (4-3)
Michigan State (4-3)
Cal (4-2)

Quad 1 record is hugely important, and because Cal is clinging to a couple of quad 1 wins (Home win over #23 FSU, road win over #44 Stanford) Cal’s resume stacks up very well.

But Cal’s competitors will likely keep earning Quad 1 wins of their own as conference play continues, which is why the following games likely to be Quad 1 are critical:

• Thursday, 1/30, vs. North Carolina

• Thursday, 2/6, at Louisville

• Thursday, 2/27, vs. Georgia Tech

Previewing North Carolina

The Tar Heels are 18-4, and there is a pattern to those wins and losses.

When North Carolina wins, they tend to smother teams defensively. Indiana scored just 39 points in 64 possessions. Top 25 Kentucky scored just 53 points in 66 possessions. Duke scored just 46 points . . . in a game that went to overtime!!!

But in UNC’s four losses, that defense cracks. UConn, Georgia Tech, Notre Dame, and Florida State all scored a point/possession or more, and UNC’s good-not-great offense couldn’t keep up.

So, Can Cal’s offense score on UNC? Well, the good news is that UNC’s defense isn’t exactly like Duke’s defense. North Carolina doesn’t force an insane number of turnovers like Duke, and they aren’t elite at preventing teams from taking threes like Duke. So there’s reason to think that this is a much better match-up.

Personnel-wise, UNC is like Cal in that their scoring is very balanced across a core group of starters. The battle between 6’3’’ Maria Gakdeng and 6’3’’ Michelle Onyiah inside will be one to watch, but it’s combo guard Alyssa Ustby who does the most with the ball both as a scorer and a creator, and I’ll be watching how Cal chooses to guard her.

UNC is a tough team, arguably the best team Cal has faced all year long. But the Bears are still undefeated at Haas Pavilion. Brace yourselves, we have the makings of a banger on Thursday night in Berkeley.