I don't understand why NET rankings seemingly favor Mountain West and the WCC so much.
St. Mary's at 8??
5 Mountain West teams in the top 50 and UNLV sitting at 53? There's only 11 teams in that conference. Take a look, for example, Utah State at 26 and Nevada is at 29 and neither team has beaten anybody. Nevada's only "good" win is against Boise St who's NET is inexplicably 35 and Boise St.'s only "good" win is against Utah State. Who's regarding the Mountain west so high that these wins mean that much.
Same thing happened come tourney selection time last year. Mountain West got 4 teams in and WCC got 3 in. Something about the NET ranking that is over valuing these conferences.
Their conferences are set up in a way that is very NET favorable.
WCC: 2 top teams (8 St. Mary's, 12 Gonzaga), 4 mediocre teams (79 Santa Clara, 90 BYU, 101 LMU, 113 SF), and 4 bad but not terrible teams (156 Pepperdine, 186 Portland, 211 San Diego, 214 Pacific). The top teams can pad their wins and efficiency numbers in their conference slate without a ton of risk, so they can stay relatively high without dropping - so long as they play well OOC.
MWC: 5 good-not-elite teams (23 SDSU, 26 Utah St, 29 Nevada, 35 Boise St, 47 NM, 53 UNLV), 2 mediocre teams (107 Colorado St, 112 San Jose St), and 3 bad but not terrible teams (162 Air Force, 191 Fresno St, 200 Wyoming). Similar to WCC, but with fewer bottom-end teams, their benefits to the top end are more spread out and not consolidated in just 2 teams.
The B1G has a lot of quality parity and just one bad-not-terrible team. We just beat up on each other, and no one can really maintain much separation from the pack. If any of our top 13 teams were in the WCC or MWC, they'd probably be Top 10-15... but we keep cannibalizing ourselves because no game is easy.