After Purdue lost three of its top five in minutes from a team that lifted a 44-year curse to make the Final Four last spring, consensus opinion predicted the Boilers safely out of the tournament's upper echelon this year.

You might want to check that consensus again. Because with the way Purdue has been playing, expectations for another deep March run can be rooted in numerical fact.

The handful of metrics which aim to calculate the strength of a team’s results – its resume in bracket parlance – are loving the Boilermakers right now.

Every Monday through the rest of the season, Boiler Upload will share the opinions of the people and algorithms that try to predict what the committee will decide next month when it draws up the tournament field.

This week, as Purdue rides a wave of eight conference wins in its last nine games, the Boilers are in good company.

We'll start with ESPN's Joe Lunardi, who dropped Purdue from a No. 2 to a No. 3 seed as of Friday morning, notably before the Boilers' win over Indiana that night.

USA Today's bracket also lists Purdue as a No. 3, but CBS is higher on the Boilers, setting them as a No. 2 seed in the Midwest Region, which they occupy with No. 1 seed Alabama and two Big Ten teams: No. 6 seed Michigan and No. 5 Illinois.

Purdue is in the Midwest Region in all three of those projections, meaning it would play the second weekend in Indianapolis if it made it that far. In ESPN's projection, the Boilers are set up for potential dates with No. 6 seed Ole Miss and No. 2 seed Marquette on their road out of the region.

Purdue excels in resume metrics, currently ranking sixth in Barttorvik's Wins Above Bubble stat and fifth in EvanMiya's Resume Quality. Thus, both algorithms position the Boilermakers as a No. 2-seed. For more information on those statistics, see the section below.

Purdue's resume is riding on the strength of its wins more than the permissibility of its losses, per EvanMiya; the Boilers' win strength ranks fifth, while their losses place 15th.

Purdue is 6-5 in the NET system's Quadrant 1, in a five-way tie for fourth in the country in Quad 1 wins. The Boilers have one of the best Quad 2 records in America, at 6-0.

As an aside, and for some perspective on a past Purdue opponent, Auburn is a silly 12-1 in Quad 1 games as it runs away with the tournament's top seed.

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 is 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 use if you know the NET rankings, 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 (though no team has managed that yet) would count the same as, say, a road win over 68-ranked 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 13.1 games so far if it played Purdue's schedule. The Boilermakers have 17 wins, and so possess a Resume Quality of 3.9 (wins above a bubble team).