The No. 1 team in college basketball — as of now, and according to the NCAA’s official men’s hoops metric — is Ohio State. The Buckeyes sit atop the NET rankings, which made their 2019-20 debut Monday. It’s the second straight season Ohio State has been the top team in the first version of the NET rankings. Here’s the initial top 20 with full rankings at the bottom of this story.

1. Ohio State
2. Kansas
3. San Diego State
4. Butler
5. Baylor
6. Gonzaga
7. Auburn
8. Louisville
9. Stanford
10. Dayton
11. Maryland
12. West Virginia
13. Duke
14. Wichita State
15. Arizona
16. Memphis
17. Oregon
18. Penn State 
19. Liberty
20. Duquesne

The NET rankings, which are in their second year of existence and are the most highly prioritized sorting system for Division I men’s basketball, will be viewable to the public every day for the remainder of the season at this link. 

The NET is important because, like the (thankfully now-dead) RPI before it, it functions as the classification instrument that influences much of the data on official team sheets. That data gives selection committee members reference for strength of schedule and determines Quad 1, 2, 3 and 4 wins and losses. 

After the 2018-19 debut version brought an onslaught of criticism for its shallow sample size — it was released into the wild just 20 days into last season, making way for schools like Loyola-Marymount, Radford, Georgia Southern and San Francisco to make the top 26 — this year’s unsheathing was much more patient: we are 41 days deep into 2019-20. 

The NCAA’s choice on this was a good move. The first rankings, on the surface, look more congruent than early iterations from last season. Though there are still some head-scratchers. For instance, 8-1 Kentucky seems just a tad low down at No. 58.

And the important reminder: the NET will continue to get the most attention/criticism/speculation because it’s the NCAA’s property and official metric. But the committee still cites and uses, in an official capacity, KenPom, the Sagarin Ratings, KPI and ESPN’s BPI and Strength of Record ratings.

The guts of the NET and its secretive algorithm were not adjusted from last season to this one, though Dan Gavitt, senior vice president of NCAA men’s basketball, did tell CBS Sports recently that there was discussion by the selection committee as to whether modifications should be made. Ultimately, the committee members and the NCAA’s decision-makers were satisfied with how the NET settled on Selection Sunday. We’ll see if that remains the case for 2019-20. 

Now, some quick-hit thoughts on the first offering of the NET:

• There are only four undefeated teams standing and they are all in the top 20: No. 1 Ohio State, No. 7 Auburn, No. 19 Liberty, No. 20 Duquesne.
• Stanford is the eye-opener in the top 20, as the Cardinal haven’t been a staple in the rankings this season and are currently 48th and KenPom and 42nd at Torvik. Will be an interesting team to track. Stanford hosts Kansas on Dec. 29.
• Michigan State (7-3), the preseason near-unanimous No. 1 team, is 29th. And No. 39 Texas Tech, at 6-3, is somehow ahead of the team it lost to in the national title game, 8-1 Virginia (No. 43), by four spots.  
• Highest-ranked team that’s lowest in the NET? It’s Kentucky. No. 6 in the polls, No. 58 in the NET. 
• Another team much lower than expected: Xavier at 71. 
• YIKES! North Carolina (6-4) is 95th.
• Duke has the most Quad 1 wins (4) of any team. And the only teams with at least three are Butler, Baylor and Michigan. Further explaining how Duke could be as “low” as 13th yet lead the sport in Quad 1 wins: it’s the only team in the NET’s top 30 that owns Quad 3 or Quad 4 loss. The home loss to Stephen F. Austin currently registers as a Quad 3 defeat.
• And if you’re wondering where Stephen F. Austin lands: an overall-solid 74th.
• Predictive metrics such as KenPom, the Massey Ratings and Sagarin have the Big Ten as the best conference in college basketball. The NET backs that up, as 11 of the top 51 teams are from the Big Ten. Average overall rating: 29.5. As a comparison, the top nine teams in the Big East (excluding Providence at 146) have an average overall NET rating of 45.4.
• The highest-ranked three-loss team is Michigan (21st). The highest-ranked four-loss team is BYU (42nd). The lowest-ranked undefeated team is Duquesne (20th). The lowest-ranked one-loss team is Easter Michigan (147th).
• Lastly, it’s still not good enough that the NET is lacking in transparency. While we know the properties involved, we don’t know the weights assigned to those properties and, as I have written multiple times before, we don’t even know for sure if some factors are being doubled up (such as efficiency models and potential overlap or supersession on win margin).

Initial NET rankings