It can be easy to get lost in the sea of metrics, acronyms and analytics-based services that start flying around the college basketball universe this time of year. On official team sheets used by the NCAA Tournament selection committee, there are a whopping seven metrics, all with some sort of shorthand abbreviation.

If you only have the bandwidth to master one before Selection Sunday, consider learning Wins Above Bubble. Introduced officially last season to the NCAA Tournament selection process, WAB is a resume-based metric rapidly becoming a staple of the college hoops lexicon.

WAB is unaffected by victory margin and simply measures what you’ve accomplished against your schedule vs. what the average bubble team would have accomplished against the same schedule.

“I think fans would be probably pretty surprised that the selection of the at-large teams was probably more highly correlated to a team’s WAB ranking than it was their NET ranking,” NCAA senior vice president of basketball Dan Gavitt told CBS Sports, referring back to last year’s selection decisions.

One high-profile example: at No. 42 in WAB, North Carolina edged No. 43 West Virginia for an at-large spot. The Tar Heels owned a 0.79 WAB “score” vs. a 0.78 mark for the Mountaineers.

That meant UNC had a projected 0.79 more wins against its schedule than what the average bubble team would have produced. 

The 2025 NCAA Tournament selection process brought the significance of WAB into focus, and for good reason. It’s a useful tool because it allows for a comparison of two teams that have played vastly different schedules.

Bracketology: Michigan cements itself as No. 1 overall seed, Nebraska slips to a No. 4 seed

David Cobb

Example: Miami University (No. 33) and Auburn (No. 38) were separated by five spots in WAB on Wednesday morning, despite the fact that the Redhawks have zero losses and Auburn has 11.

How WAB works

Using a combination of each opponent’s strength and the location of the game, WAB puts a 0-1 score on each game based on how likely the standard bubble team (No. 45 in the NET) would be to win. Big-time opponents bring big-time WAB payouts for wins and relatively small WAB hits for losses.

According to wabwatch.com, Auburn’s win at Florida on Jan. 24 is worth a whopping 0.92 in WAB. That’s a hefty number which acknowledges how difficult it is to slay a highly ranked NET foe like Florida on the road. 

An average bubble team would only be expected to win that game 8% of the time. As such, losing that game would have only brought a 0.08 reduction in Auburn’s WAB score, which sits at 1.78 as the Tigers prepare to play at Mississippi State on Wednesday night.

By comparison, Miami University’s MAC victories are producing paltry WAB returns. As estimated by wabwatch.com, the Redhawks’ Jan. 31 home win over Northern Illinois brought Miami a laughable 0.02 addition to its WAB score. But because the Redhawks haven’t lost a game, those small gains in WAB have been adding up, and Miami’s WAB score is 2.07 after Tuesday night’s win at UMass.

That WAB figure and a low-to-mid 30s WAB ranking is good enough to put Miami in at-large territory…for now. But if the Redhawks lose, it will be a costly defeat against a MAC opponent that would bring roughly a 7-10 spot drop in Miami’s WAB ranking, which could matter significantly in the selection process.

While it’s improbable that any selection or seeding decision made by the committee would be based on a single metric, WAB can be a guiding light in resume evaluations. It certainly was in 2025.

“Well the hardest decisions the committee has to make, I think, are probably those ones at the bottom of the at-large selection, right?” Gavitt said. “There’s a reason why everyone tracks this so closely, the bubble teams. Who is going to get in and who’s not going to get in? Comparing those resumes is often a real challenge when you have schools from different leagues, or very different schedule strengths. 

“You really want to try to rightsize that as much as possible and be comparing apples to apples versus apples to oranges. And the WAB, I think, has helped the committee do just that.”

What about the NET?

NET has become one of the most commonly referenced college basketball metrics since the NCAA introduced it for the 2018-19 season. The “NCAA Evaluation Tool” remains a vital cog in selection methodology.

However, it is not necessarily a “resume” tool. NET is influenced by margin of victory and efficiency, which is a feature and not a bug. Because of the way it’s designed, a team’s NET ranking gives a view of how difficult that team is to beat and not necessarily a full view of its resume. 

UConn is a great example. The Huskies are No. 10 in NET entering their Wednesday game against Creighton. Yet, they are projected as the fourth No. 1 seed in CBS Sports Bracketology. Why? Because of a resume that ranks No. 3 in WAB and is highlighted by victories over Illinois, Florida and Kansas.

But as a team that has found itself in a handful close battles against mediocre opposition during a 14-1 start to Big East play, UConn is not enshrined by predictive metrics.

As Gavitt put it to CBS Sports, “where your team is ranked in the NET is far less important than where your opponents are ranked in NET.” 

Your opponent’s NET ranking and game location determines if the game is classified as Quad 1, Quad 2, Quad 3 or Quad 4. And your opponent’s NET ranking is also used in formulating the WAB impact that comes with a win/loss.

“We’re glad that there’s a focus on the NET, because it’s something we developed, we think it has a lot of utility,” Gavitt said. “But at the same time, we want to make sure people are not hyper-focused or overly focused on that, because it’s really just one component. Frankly, there are other things that weigh in much more significantly in the process these days than your overall team NET ranking.”