Men's College Basketball Top 10, Bubble Team NET Rankings: A Top-10 Shakeup

The top 25 rankings are important for understanding just who is killing it in college basketball, but we can go deeper — all the way to the bubble and beyond.

The NCAA Evaluation Tool, or NET, is a rankings system used in Division I basketball to help figure out which teams are going to participate in March Madness. As the NCAA puts it, NET "takes into account game results, strength of schedule, game location, net offensive and defensive efficiency, and the quality of wins and losses," the latter of which is determined by placing every Division I matchup into different quadrants, ranked 1 through 4, with 1 being the strongest teams and 4 the weakest — Quads aren’t just determined by record, but also whether a game was played at home, on the road or at a neutral site.

Using NET, we can get a sense of which teams are the best at a given moment, as well as which ones are on the bubble for selection in March. While updated daily by the NCAA, we’ll track changes weekly.

With that, here are the top 10 men’s college basketball teams through Feb. 23, according to NET.

UConn stopped a multi-week slide, sticking within the top 10 thanks to wins against Creighton and Villanova — the latter was especially important, since Villanova even now is a top-30 team in NET and one of the few Big East teams slated for March Madness. Of course, it helps the Huskies that the teams behind them in NET this time last week — Nebraska, Louisville and Vanderbilt — didn’t exactly have weeks to remember.

A real rough week for Houston, which has lost three in a row in Big 12 conference play. To the Cougars’ credit, those losses came against three ranked opponents, not "just" teams familiar with them, but Houston is ranked, as well — in fact, it was No.