Gonzaga sits 'just out of the field' in new NCAA Tournament resume evaluator

The Bulldogs' postseason resume to this point is not good enough to get an at-large bid
Gonzaga Bulldogs head coach Mark Few.
Gonzaga Bulldogs head coach Mark Few. / Photo by Erik Smith, Myk Crawford
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Based on almost every account from predictive analytics websites and NCAA-sanctioned sorting tools used to evaluate college basketball teams, in some ways, the Gonzaga Bulldogs stack up to the top teams in the country that are competing for a high seed in the NCAA Tournament.

Despite their omission from the AP Top 25 poll following back-to-back losses, the Zags (16-6, 7-2 WCC) are still hovering around the top 20 teams in the country according to credible rankings from KenPom (No. 10), Torvik (No. 16), Haslametrics (No. 13) and the all-important NET (12), which has been one of the NCAA Tournament selection committee's main resources for seeding teams on Selection Sunday since it replaced the RPI system in 2018.

However, one data scientist is striving to change how fans, analysts and committees view the hierarchy of college basketball through a new way of evaluating a team's quality of wins. Based on the metric's initial returns, the Bulldogs have some work to do if they're to make a 26th consecutive appearance in the NCAA Tournament.

Evan Miyakawa, the brains behind EvanMiya.com, introduced a new resume metric on his site called "Resume Quality," which divides a team's "body of work" into quality of wins and quality of losses. According to Miyakawa's blog, the site's new feature determines how difficult each game on a team's schedule is based on how a team that would be considered on the cutline to make the tournament would perform against the same competition. It's similar to Torvik's Wins Above Bubble metric and carries the same sentiments as the WAR stat used in baseball to evaluate pitchers.

With regard to Miyakawa's metric, a team's quality of resume is the sum of win quality — which measures how strong a win is based on difficulty — and loss quality, or rather, how bad a loss is based on the difficulty of those games. It's also equal to a team's number of wins subtracted by the expected number of wins a bubble team would have against that schedule.

In the first "Resume Quality" rankings that debuted on EvanMiya.com Thursday, the Bulldogs checked in at No. 50 with a resume quality that was valued below zero (-0.3). That resume quality has Gonzaga in the "just out of the field" category, as any resume quality below zero is deemed as "not good enough to get a bid" by Miyakawa's standards.

Arguably the Bulldogs' most notable wins to this point in the season are over Baylor, San Diego State on the road and Indiana on a neutral court during the Battle 4 Atlantis. When looking at "Resume Qaulity," though, the Aztecs (No. 40), Bears (No. 44) and Hoosiers (No. 49) are either hovering around the bubble or on the outside looking in with the Zags. Meanwhile, losses to Santa Clara, West Virginia on a neutral and at Oregon State have outweighed Gonzaga's best wins to this point.

There's still some runway left for the Zags to make up some lost ground before Selection Sunday rolls around, the most notable checkpoints being both matchups against Saint Mary's. The Gaels, ranked No. 27 in "Resume Quality," host the first meeting between West Coast Conference rivals on Saturday at 8 p.m. in Moraga, California, before returning the favor with a trip to Spokane on Feb. 22.

Of course, if Gonzaga were to win the WCC conference tournament in Las Vegas and thus secure an automatic bid, the rankings become mostly frivolous at that point.

The Bulldogs sit on the 8-seed line in the latest ESPN Bracketology update from Joe Lunardi and on the 9-seed line in the newest field from CBS Sports' Jerry Palm.

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Cole Forsman
COLE FORSMAN

Cole Forsman is a reporter for Gonzaga Bulldogs On SI. Cole holds a degree in Journalism and Sports Management from Gonzaga University.