New Metric Highlights Major Flaw In Gonzaga's NCAA Tournament Resume

Originally posted on Athlon Sports | By Andy Patton | Last updated Jan 30, 2025 3:08 PM ET

The Gonzaga Bulldogs are 16-6 on the season, 7-2 in conference play, and as of Thursday sit at No. 12 in the NET rankings - one of the key metrics used by the Selection Sunday committee to make the bracket for the NCAA Tournament.

However, a newly created resume metric by Evan Miyakawa, which he calls Resume Quality, highlights the significant issue with Gonzaga's resume currently, with about six weeks until March Madness begins.

Resume Quality is a simple measurement of a team's win quality and loss quality, which is determined based on how difficult each game on a team's schedule is based on how a team on the at-large cutline would fare in those games.

Those two numbers are added together to get your overall Resume Quality, and Evan has created a table on his website to show each team's current performance and where that projects the team to fall in the NCAA Tournament.

Gonzaga's win quality comes out to 3.0, which ranks No. 40, but their loss quality is -3.3 (No. 59) which gives them an overall resume quality of -0.3, No. 50 overall and in the "Just out of the field" category.

Gonzaga's resume quality is below teams like San Diego State, Indiana, Arizona State, and Baylor - all opponents the Zags have beaten - as well as programs like Wake Forest, North Texas, Drake, and UC Irvine.

The main issue for Gonzaga is the poor quality losses, namely the recent loss at home to Santa Clara (-0.74) and the road loss to Oregon State (-0.57). Additionally, the team's best wins have not aged particularly well, with Baylor, San Diego State, and Indiana all struggling to perform in the Big 12, Mountain West, and Big Ten respectively.

Plenty of opportunities for quality wins still await the Zags, however, including a road tilt against Saint Mary's (No. 27) on Saturday, a home game against the Gaels two weeks later, two games against San Francisco, and road matchups against Washington State and Santa Clara.

Plus, while Evan's data is almost certainly a more accurate, granular look at college basketball resumes than the basic quad system used by the NET rankings, that is what the committee uses - and Gonzaga is positioned far more favorably by that metric.

As always, the ball remains firmly in the court of Mark Few's team. If they can split with Saint Mary's, sweep San Francisco, and don't fall victim to any other trap games they will be in a comfortable position not only to get an at-large bid into the NCAA Tournament - if they don't win the WCC championship - but to still earn a single digit seed and compete for a tenth straight Sweet 16 appearance.

This article first appeared on Athlon Sports and was syndicated with permission.

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