The NET doesn't do what you're asking it to

Villanova is a solid basketball team playing some of their best hoops of the season right now. They've lost just one of their last seven and have been playing like a tournament team in that span, ranking 40th in the Torvik. They are - at least since Justin Moore's return - a formidable opponent.

Xavier lost by 1 to them at home. Under the NET system that is a Quad 3 loss.

Utah Tech is a D2 basketball program fighting its way to D1 status. They are 13-17 this year, and 3 of those wins have come against non-D1 teams. They are 5-12 in the WAC, which Ken Pomeroy lists as the 11th-best conference in the nation. Speaking of KenPom, he has Utah Tech as 153rd overall. They're not good.

If Xavier played them at home, it would also be a Quad 3 game.

If you're wondering what kind of sense that makes, it's not much on the surface. It took about 8 minutes after the debut of the NET for people to decide that games in Q1 and Q2 were good and anything below that was bad. If the team you beat or lost to is 76th in the NET (like Nova is now), you watch their games hoping they'll pull one out and make everything look a little rosier for you. In reality, the difference between 75 and 76 is miniscule, but on a team sheet, the difference between Q2 and Q3 is massive.

The hard delineation between quads is a massive flaw in the NET, but only if you use it as your only tool. In addition to NET on the team sheets, the Selection Committee has KPI and SOR as results based metrics and KenPom, BPI, and Sagarin as predictive ones. Beyond all that, I'm like 80% certain they also have access to Google. They can find whatever they need.

The NET isn't flawed so much as it is just not comprehensive. The fun game to play in March is to figure out whatever metric suits your argument and use it; the Committee is tasked with sorting through all of that and trying to give us the right 68 teams. In the meantime, just know that anyone who is pulling just a NET ranking - or just a KenPom or a Torvik or any other single metric - and using it as the basis of righteous indignation regarding their team's current positioning is being either ignorant or disingenuous.