Women’s College Basketball Metrics: Understanding WAB and Why It Matters

We want to make sure you know what the Division I Women’s Basketball Committee will be talking about in the selection room before they release the NCAA tournament bracket for March Madness.

The DI Women’s Basketball Committee uses a list of 12 criteria:

• Bad Losses
• Common Opponents
• Competitive in Losses
• Early Performance Versus Late Performance
• Head-To-Head
• Observable Component
• Overall Record
• Regional Rankings
• Significant Wins
• Strength of Schedule

The remaining two criteria are metrics: NCAA Evaluation Tool (NET), which the committee has used since the 2021 championship, and Wins Above Bubble (WAB), which is new this year.

The NET is a prediction tool based on who you played with, where you played, how well you played, and the outcome of the game. In four of the five years that the NET was created, the team ranked first on Selection Sunday has won the national title.

WAB was introduced this season to supplement the NET metric. It does not take into account the margin of wins or losses or the effectiveness of a team; instead, it measures the quality of your CV based on the outcomes. WAB is results-oriented, going beyond the strength of the schedule to illustrate how a team performed against it. Each game’s result is assigned a value ranging from 1 to -1, and the cumulative total determines a team’s ranking.

According to the NCAA’s standards and processes for this year’s bracket, WAB indicates how many more or fewer wins a team has than a bubble club would average against that same schedule. The WAB bases opponent strength on the NET, with a “bubble team” defined as a team rated 45th in the NET after analysing recent women’s basketball seasons.

A lot can happen between now and Selection Sunday, and it’s important to remember that these two indicators are only part of the criteria the committee will consider when making its selection.