And you thought our rankings were bad

Congratulations to the Ohio State Buckeyes, the best team in college basketball so far this season!

That’s right! The NCAA released its first NET update of the season, and the Buckeyes are No. 1. If you forgot, the NET is that new metric that the NCAA concocted that is supposed to replace RPI. It’s the more modern version of an outdated way of ranking teams. It was supposed to be better. It was supposed to be smarter. It was not supposed to be...this. An utter disaster that ranks Loyola Marymount in the top 10 and Radford at No. 22. No disrespect to either of those programs, but come on.

Here are the complete rankings

The top 10:

Now we have to be fair. These will update daily and are a work in progress. In February, they will likely be far more representative of the actual basketball landscape.

But holy cow, this is bad. And, even under the best-case scenario, where all the quirks work themselves out and it’s a decent ranking system by March, this release has already undermined its credibility. In a huge way. It’s been out for 10 minutes and I think that’s already safe to say.

Seriously, folks at the NCAA have to have realized how this would be received. Why couldn’t they have held it until the rankings looked better? Until the statistical oddities worked themselves out? It also begs the question: What the hell did these look like before Feast Week — a standard early season mark where teams reveal their true selves?

Some more highlights:

• Texas Tech is better than Duke. Congrats to the Red Raiders!
• Belmont is No. 12 overall. Congrats to Cam!
• The following teams are ranked ahead of Kentucky: Liberty, Florida Atlantic, Abilene Christian, Duquesne, San Francisco, and Radford
• St. Bonaventure, an NCAA Tournament team last year, is No. 322
• Bucknell, which just won at Vermont, is No. 295
• San Francisco and Georgia Southern are both ahead of Tennessee
• My eyes are bleeding