If you’re a college basketball fan, here’s how to keep tabs on WAB.
), a metric that dates to the earliest years of seeded brackets. RPI eventually gave way to NET , the sport’s signature catch-all measurement for the last decade. KPI, too, has been aWAB stands for Wins Above Bubble, and it measures—broadly speaking—the number of wins a team has against its scheduleHere’s how it works in practice.
Let’s say Team A plays a difficult regular-season schedule, against which we would expect the average bubble team to go 14-17. Team A, however, rips off a rock-solid 20-11 record. Team A, then, would have a 6.0 WAB. Think of it like Wins Above Replacement in baseball, which measures the number of wins a player generates relative to the number of wins a hypothetical replacement player would generate.Per Burn’s measurement, the 10 men’s college basketball teams with the highest WAB as of Thursday are Michigan , Duke , Arizona , UConn , Houston , Purdue , Illinois , Nebraska , Iowa State , and Gonzaga .Patrick Andres is a staff writer on the Breaking and Trending News team at Sports Illustrated. He joined SI in December 2022, having worked for The Blade, Athlon Sports, Fear the Sword and Diamond Digest. Andres has covered everything from zero-attendance Big Ten basketball to a seven-overtime college football game. He is a graduate of Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism with a double major in history .
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