Get ready to add the word “quad” to women’s college basketball vocabulary this season. The NCAA Division I women’s basketball committee made a subtle yet important decision over the summer that takes another step toward equating the men’s and women’s NCAA tournaments. Starting with the upcoming 2024-25 season, the women’s tournament will use the quadrant-based system as part of the evaluation process for selecting the 68 teams to participate in March Madness.
Just as the women’s committee abandoned the RPI for the NET (NCAA Evaluation Tool) as the chief metric used to rate teams for the 2020-21 season a few years after the men, the “quad system” — which the men’s committee adopted in 2017 — will be in place to measure the quality of a win or a loss for the women. The quad system puts games in groups, employing a sliding scale to account for where the game was played.
The NET will still be used as foundational ranking system for all teams, but now the quality of a win or loss will be determined by Quadrants 1-4 rather than top 25 NET, top 50 NET or top 100 NET.