Some ratings estimate strength of schedule based on last year. As the season goes on, they reevaluate based on wins and losses. The early season estimates are arguably weeded out by the halfway point of the season.
Because the first half of NCAA basketball is out of conference games, you’re seeing an argument that the ACC started cold, and didn’t get a chance to improve their perception because by the time they were playing well, there were only conference games left.
There’s some argument that the schedule doesn’t really help find out who the most worthy teams are at the end of the season. But it’s still mostly true that the ACC didn’t have a good year. That is, the ACC got a weaker reputation than deserved, but even so they were still weaker than the other top conferences in 2024
Edit: you might have been wry in your post; if your were, it helps to put “/s” at the end of your post, or some indicator
I think the risk is the early bump (not entirely undeserved, but certainly not understood) from their early OOC wins - particularly against a subpar ACC with many rebuilding teams. You can’t know all that up front, thus the bump. That’s OK but it must be addressed and corrected.
Look at the RPI from last season at 2-weeks periods. You’ll see it. There were 4/5 SEC teams in the SOS top 25 initially. That’s about right. It stayed 5/6 past NYD. Again, based on OOC results, not bad. But then by the end of Feb there were 9 SEC teams in top 25 SOS. How did that happen? They played only themselves and the feedback loop took over, IMO.
Anytime your output from one iteration of an algorithm is then fed back into it as input for the next iteration you risk this. A moderating feature should be added that senses and responds to dampen the feedback. It’s basic complex system dynamics: probe, sense, respond. You never know when a feedback loop might arise, so you have to probe for them and respond accordingly.
As it were, the NCAAT provided that moderating input. However, the bloated SOS numbers had already justified 14 of 16 SEC teams getting slots, several with horrible conf records. The only way to justify that, again IMO, was the hyped SOS ratings that weren’t corrected.
Not saying it was surely human bias (though there likely was), but it was the data error that was (apparently) not corrected prior to its use by the committee.