I believe I was the first mother to call her son’s NCAA basketball game. It was Feast Week 2024 and Louisville had muscled its way into a 30-point lead over Indiana. With two minutes to play, coach Pat Kelsey gave Patrick the nod. He checked in at the scoring table, then stepped onto the floor for his first taste of blueblood basketball.
I couldn’t stop smiling. A minute in, the Hoosiers were called for a technical and Patrick sank both of his free throws. On the next possession, he stole the ball, drove and was fouled. The crowd was electrified. Across from the broadcast table, Coach flashed the thumbs-up — he didn’t care about anything but getting a walk-on his minutes.
The NET ranking has been a blessing for college basketball since its introduction ahead of the 2018-19 season. Its predecessor, the Ratings Percentage Index (RPI) was overly-simplistic, easily gamed and did not account for margin of victory. By contrast, the NET weighs just two metrics: the Team Value Index (TVI), a wins vs. losses score prioritizing high quality opponents and wins away from home; and the Adjusted Efficiency score, a net points per 100 possessions stat adjusted for location and strength of schedule.
Still with me? You’ll notice that under the NET, every point counts. A team which leads by 30 in crunch time still has an incentive to get shots up and play their stars. There is no “garbage time” in college basketball, just extra minutes to rack up stats and increase your NCAA Tournament stock.
In a blowout win vs. Abilene Christian last week, BYU freshman forward AJ Dybantsa played 34 minutes, including 18 in the second half, on the way to his highest-scoring game of the season (35 points). The opportunity cost was playing time for five other Cougars, who did not leave the bench all night. This is the status quo these days, and that’s okay. A dominant star like Dybantsa deserves his spotlight, and the NET guarantees his heroics will be rewarded.
My frustration is that basketball is a sport built on storylines, and the living storylines many programs have on retainer are being punished by the NET. I’m talking, of course, about walk-ons.
In a bygone era, these guys were the stuff of legend — Jeff Hornacek, Scottie Pippen — the stars the system had missed. There was a sort of mystique about them, half because they were unknown, half because they represented every college fan’s dream: to step onto the floor and hear the broadcaster admit “man, that kid’s got it.”
They are also the athletes who love the game most. They have no scholarships, and yet they participate in every scrimmage, every drill. Without professional prospects, some spend five years chasing a single shot. In the era of NIL and revenue sharing, these kids are paying to ride the bench. But the walk-on would rather grind to sit on the sidelines than watch a single game from the stands.
Walk-ons are neither prized transfers nor highly-rated recruits. They are proxies of the student body, representing their schools at the highest level. The fans love them — just look at Brandon Dwyer, a fifth-year senior out of Florida Gulf Coast who made headlines last month for scoring the first points of his college career. Dwyer had racked up over a million TikTok followers chronicling his “journey to one point,” and finally got his shot in a blowout win vs. the New College of Florida. With four minutes to play, he checked-in, then shot 2-3 from the arc. FGCU hung 96 over the Mighty Bayans, but Dwyer’s treys (even the miss) were the rowdiest the crowd got all night.
So here’s my idea: Change the algorithm and save the walk-on. The NET rating was tweaked in 2020 and it can be again. The gist is to introduce a “walk-on metric,” a special caveat allowing coaches to play their benches without fear of damaging their NET. In games which end in a difference of at least 20 points, the winning coach would be allowed to void up to three possessions in which players under a season minutes threshold were on the court. This would only affect the rating of the winning team and could only be employed in eight games per season. For reference, the median number of possessions per game is 71.9, for a total of 2,157 over a 30 game campaign. If a coach took advantage of all 24 walk-on exceptions, just .011127% of possessions would be affected.
The impact would be outsized: benchwarmers would play on senior night, third-stringers would get their shot and the walk-on would return to college basketball. Null possessions would be tracked by the analytics bench and submitted to the NCAA for review.
“It is definitely viable,” Ken Pomeroy, the stats guru behind KenPom told me. “The official metric for the NCAA Tournament should allow coaches to do what they want when the outcome of a game is decided.”
Statistics aside, this is the emotional plea of a mother who has witnessed firsthand the impact of a few minutes. Behind each reserve player are friends and family who see his sacrifices and understand his resolve. When the game is decided, the NCAA should not deny him the chance to make a memory. All it will take is a small change to the NET, and a reminder that walk-ons are the game in its purest form.
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