NCAA notebook: NPI, Minnesota, and World Juniors up for debate

As the first half of the season winds down, I've been thinking a lot about the NPI ranking that will determine the NCAA tournament field.

You can complain about how it, like the Pairwise before it, wasn't fair in some way that speaks to your own particular grievances. (A sampling could include, but not be limited to: "It throws out results because some wins hurt you and some losses help you," or "It overweights quality of competition," or "It doesn't work as well as you might like for short-sample seasons.") But the reality is that this is what every NCAA sport uses and that's life.

Instead, the thing I've been thinking about is how weird it looks. There are, for example, .500 teams in the top 20 that don't jump off the page as "particularly good" on a national level, and other .500 teams th