Purdue players were in agreement ahead of their matchup with UCLA Friday.

"We knew we couldn't lose again," freshman guard C.J. Cox said Monday.

That's true for the player's confidence, surely, as well as the discontent of a fan base used to winning. It was also true for the Boilers' postseason seeding aspirations. The win over the Bruins counted as a Quadrant 1 win, among the best at boosting a team's resume and Purdue's first since it beat Iowa almost a month ago.

Every Monday through the rest of the season, I will share the opinions of the people and algorithms that try to predict what the committee will decide in roughly two weeks when it draws up the tournament field.

This week, Purdue's predicted seed continued to feel reverberations of the Boilers' recent losing streak but showed signs of an upward trend.

Bracket sentiment will always trail results, and that's what we observed this week, as Purdue's average seed dipped further, from 3.3 on Feb. 26 to 4.14 Monday, on bracketmatrix.com.

Friday's win against UCLA swayed opinions some, though: Purdue's average seed among brackets predicted Saturday and beyond is about four, against 4.2 beforehand.

CBS's Jerry Palm listed Purdue as a No. 3 seed Sunday, playing in Providence the first weekend with an East (Newark) regional draw. On3's James Fletcher III predicted the Boilers for a No. 5 seed in the Midwest (Indianapolis), playing their first game(s) in Denver.

Bracket resume algorithms, like they did last week, could show us which way the Boilers' seed prediction is likely to go in the coming days.

If only they were still in agreement.

For the first time this season, EvanMiya's Resume Quality and Barttorvik's Wins Above Bubble formulas substantially differ on the quality of Purdue's results. The former is higher on the Boilers, at 14th, while WAB slots them in at No. 20.

EvanMiya's numbers allow for slightly more granular analysis, splitting up a team's resume quality number into the impressiveness of its wins and the excusableness of its losses, so that may be the best place to do some investigating.

Purdue's loss quality has been dogging it for weeks, holding up worse next to its win quality even before the team dropped four-straight games. The site doesn't allow for looks into the past, but my memory holds that Purdue's loss quality dipped into the high 30s after its loss to Indiana.

Now, the Boilers' loss quality places 25th and their win quality was boosted to 13th after they knocked off the Bruins. So a strong finish to the season would likely leave a No. 3 seed on the table for Purdue.

Purdue is now 8-8 in Quadrant 1, picking up its first such win in nearly a month over UCLA. The Boilers tie for sixth in the country in Quad 1 wins, but their win percentage in them lags some other No. 4 seed contenders like Michigan (8-4) and Texas Tech (6-5).

As has been the case for more than a month now, Purdue's Quad 2 record provides a boost: The Boilers are 6-1 in Quad 2 for a combined 14-9 record in the top two quadrants.

The most-discussed numerical resume system is probably the NCAA's NET Quadrants. The NET, or NCAA Evaluation Tool, ranks teams very similarly to Kenpom or other algorithmic interpreters of game results.

The Quadrant system is just a way of ranking wins and losses through the lens of the NET rankings. A Quad 1 game is a home game played against a team ranked 1-30 in the NET, a neutral court game against a team ranked 1-50 or an away contest with a top-75 opponent. Quadrants two through four are much the same, just with lower NET rankings thresholds.

The Quadrant system is easy to understand, but there are two very sound, straightforward alternatives: Barttorvik's Wins Above Bubble and EvanMiya's Resume Quality.

Those two metrics correct what can be a pretty big shortcoming of the Quadrant system: beating Auburn in Neville Arena would count the same as, say, a road win over USC .

Barttorvik and EvanMiya's stats more closely hew to the committee's process in evaluating the strength of wins not with four rigid buckets, but by assigning "points" based on impressiveness. They each estimate how likely a team on the tournament's bubble would be to win a given game, and use that likelihood to give or take credit from the teams playing it, depending on the result.

For instance, a team smack-dab right on the cutline to receive an at-large tournament bid would be expected to win 16 games so far if it played Purdue's schedule. The Boilermakers have 20 wins, and so possess a Resume Quality of 4.0 (wins above a bubble team).