Forget the NET. This is the Selection Sunday metric Kentucky fans need to know
Mark Pope’s Kentucky Wildcats woke up Sunday morning as the losers of three straight basketball games, with one of the nation’s toughest remaining schedules ahead of them.
They’re still in good shape for the NCAA Tournament. As far as getting into the field, at least.
Angst over the possibility of missing the March Madness bracket on Selection Sunday continues to be overblown for a UK team that entered the penultimate week of the regular season with a 17-10 overall record and 8-6 mark in the SEC, which — despite lesser top-end talent than it had last year at this time — is still considered to be the toughest conference in college basketball.
And while the frustrating loss at Auburn on Saturday night did likely hurt Kentucky’s seeding status with three weeks to go until Selection Sunday, it probably didn’t do too much damage.
A relatively new acronym from the NCAA spells that out pretty clearly.
While the NCAA-created NET ratings have been the go-to talking point as the selection process has ramped up in recent years, another ranking — called “Wins Above Bubble” — is the one that fans of the sport should be tracking more closely in the coming weeks.
Wins Above Bubble — known in college basketball circles as “WAB” — was introduced into the NCAA process last year. Senior NCAA officials pointed out in the aftermath of the 2025 selection process that teams’ WAB ranking correlated more with their actual March Madness seed than the NET ratings did.
That was reiterated last Thursday, when the NCAA gathered national college basketball media members together for a “mock selection process” that tasked them with filling out the bracket, based on the season so far.
It was stated at that exercise that WAB would be a key sorting tool for the actual selection committee this year. That was confirmed 48 hours later, when the real committee revealed its top 16 seeds — as of Saturday — for a special tournament preview show on CBS.
In fact, the committee’s current top 18 teams were announced on that program, with Alabama and Arkansas revealed to be the last two eliminated. And those 18 were the same teams slotted 1-18 in the WAB rankings going into the weekend’s games.
That illustrates just how much WAB will matter going into the actual Selection Sunday. And UK has a WAB ranking that would put it safely into the tournament field, with more room to rise than fall in the rankings over these last few games.
The loss at Auburn — a game that the Tigers were expected to win — serves as a perfect example of how little such a result can affect the Wildcats’ WAB ranking.
Going into the game, UK was ranked 26th nationally in the WAB. After the dust settled on all of Saturday’s results, the Cats were ranked 27th in that metric. Both of those rankings would put Kentucky in the range of a 7 seed.
If the Wildcats had pulled out a victory in Auburn, however, it’s likely that they would have jumped two spots to No. 24 in the rankings, which would be the position of the final 6 seed.
And though the Cats’ remaining schedule is daunting — ESPN’s BPI ratings project it as the third-toughest in the country, starting with a road game at South Carolina on Tuesday night — that means UK has more to gain than lose, from a WAB perspective.
How do the WAB rankings work?
Kentucky is expected to be the underdog in each of its three remaining games after the matchup with South Carolina on Tuesday night, and that means higher-reward, lower-risk WAB possibilities for the Wildcats down the stretch.
The WAB attempts to measure what a team has accomplished against its schedule vs. what the average NCAA Tournament bubble team would have done against the same schedule.
To start this week, Kentucky had a WAB score of 2.79, meaning that the Cats have a projected 2.79 more victories against its schedule than the average bubble team would have earned. Pope’s team went into the Auburn game with a 3.06 WAB score, losing .27 points with the defeat.
The WAB applies a 0.0-1.0 score to each game — based on how likely the average bubble team (No. 45 in the NET ratings) would be to win it — and it is a cumulative score over the course of the season.
A team’s overall score for the season rises after each victory — the more difficult the game, the more points are gained — and falls with each loss, though games in which the team in question is the underdog would lead to fewer lost points.
So, UK’s win at Tennessee, for example, was worth almost a full point in the WAB rankings, while earlier wins over heavy underdogs like Eastern Illinois and Tennessee Tech were worth hardly anything. Conversely, if the Cats had lost in Knoxville, it wouldn’t have done much to hurt their WAB score, while a loss to one of those nonconference cupcakes would have deducted nearly a full point off their final tally.
Utilizing the WAB allows the NCAA selection committee to take two teams with vastly different schedules and make a better comparison of their tournament résumés.
BartTorvik.com offers unofficial WAB projections for each game, and — while the NCAA uses different numbers, based on its in-house NET ratings — those Torvik projections offer a fairly accurate glimpse of the opportunities still available to the Wildcats.
For instance, that game at South Carolina on Tuesday night was — heading into the week — the only one in which the Wildcats were expected to win. Torvik projected a .41-point WAB bump for Kentucky with a victory there. A loss would result in a drop of roughly .6 points.
But pulling off upsets in the three games that follow would bring more WAB clout, while defeats in those matchups would lead to smaller WAB losses.
Torvik’s projections have UK making the following gains with wins in these games: Vanderbilt in Rupp Arena on Saturday (.62 points gained), at Texas A&M next Tuesday (.72) and home against Florida on March 7 (.77).
Examining Kentucky’s current WAB number, along with the possibility of points gained and lost down the stretch — as well as the numbers of the teams below them in the overall rankings but still on the right side of the bubble — it would likely take losing all of its remaining games (meaning a defeat at South Carolina, too) for UK to miss out on the NCAA Tournament this season.
And even that might not be enough to keep the Cats out of the field on Selection Sunday.
If Kentucky can pull off just one upset to close out the regular season, that would serve as a net-positive for its WAB score, which as of now has Pope’s team solidly in 7-seed territory. Two upsets — beating Vandy and A&M, for example — would be enough to work the Wildcats into the 5-seed conversation, based on the current projections.
Those responsible for bracketology predictions have also clearly been paying close attention to the WAB. One example: the CBS bracketology board, which was updated after UK’s loss to Auburn, still had the Cats as a 6 seed Sunday, placing them among the top 24 teams in the country, not at all a stretch given their WAB ranking of 27th nationally.
One other major wrinkle to note on the WAB: the margin of a result doesn’t matter. That’s a good thing for Kentucky, in particular, and it’s one big reason why the Wildcats’ WAB rating to start this week is so much better than the team’s standing in other measures like the AP Top 25 poll.
Eliminating margin of defeat from the equation means that UK’s lopsided losses to Gonzaga (35 points), Vanderbilt (25 points), Michigan State (17 points) and Alabama (15 points) count the same in the WAB as a one-point loss would have.
The Cats have just two double-digit wins against projected tournament teams — 12-point victories over Indiana and St. John’s back in December — so eliminating the margins is a clear net-positive for their WAB ranking.
And with the WAB ranking set to have a major impact on a team’s actual seed on Selection Sunday, that leaves Kentucky in a better position than would be expected as the season draws to a close.
