December 5, 2022
Locked on Women’s Basketball: The NET is here! Chaos in the Top 25, Ranking roundup with an AP Poll voter
By The Next
Missy and Alex discuss the NET — chaos in the Top 25 and AP Poll
It’s time for another episode of the Locked on Women’s Basketball podcast. This episode features host Missy Heidrick who is joined by Alex Simon of Bay Area News Group to explain what the NET is. And explain how it looks at teams as the season goes along. They’ll also take a look at a chaotic week in women’s college basketball and how that impacted the AP Poll.
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Alex talks about NET Rankings and what surprised him the most:
“I think part of it is just that it’s a system to use that outside of what we otherwise evaluate teams as. And especially, I actually like the fact that the NET Rankings don’t just instantly start you off with kind of a preconceived notion and have to bake in, like, what we thought a team was supposed to be the previous year or what we expected them to be. And we wait; we’re four weeks into the season now before we finally get the NET Rankings. So, for the most part, I think the fewest games teams have played, or everybody’s got five or six games at minimum. I think Stanford already had 11 games this season.
So by waiting, we do get a little bit more of a sense. It’s more of a what do you look like right now picture via the NET?”
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Alex talks about LSU, ranked fifth and the second SEC team in the Top 10 of the NET:
“Yeah, it was a really rough week. If you were watching LSU basketball as an LSU fan. They played two in-state games this week and probably were way closer in both of them than they thought they should be. Southeastern Louisiana was on Tuesday and a Baton Rouge native for the Lions came in and just torched LSU all throughout the game. Alexius Horne finished with 28 points on 11 of 23 shooting; the Tigers eventually pulled out a win by eight points.
But this is an LSU team that everybody has kind of hyped up as one of the top teams in the country. They’ve brought in some big transfers, including Angel Reese, but everybody could see that their nonconference schedule was paper thin. The Tulane Green Wave they just played are ranked 63rd in the NET. And that’s the best team they’ve played so far this year in nonconference. And the only team left in their nonconference who’s even close is Oregon State, which comes in at 59.”
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