...of the season. I also think that a team's NET ranking - as has always been the case with the selection committee isn't prioritized above other advanced metrics - where NET has the biggest impact is that it is now used in place of RPI to evaluate your opponents and that is where it is a huge improvement from the past. Like Iowa State's tournament seeding right now will be based on their performance relative to their opponent's NET rating way more than the fact that they are 10th in the NET. Often one of the biggest arguments about the tourney is that metrics for a specific team (including NET) are too disregarded in favor of their blind resume to be evaluated by people. I see both sides of that argument and see the positive and negative in both - if you prioritized team analytic rating you may completely eliminate the possibility of a team with a poorer seed being favored over their opponent which still happens regularly in the current format. RPI is simply a flawed metric - beyond the fact that you can game it quite easily for your own rating it weights your opponent strength of schedule FAR FAR FAR too much, and determines it in an overly simplistic way, and so to make that the way you look at blind resumes led to some terrible results. Conferences could absolutely provide advice on OOC scheduling that boosted their league in the selection process far above their actual ability to perform. The biggest issue with RPI is how highly it can rate teams with a bad record but who play very difficult schedules. So the bottom teams in P5 leagues often have huge discrepancies in their RPI vs predictive metrics.