Good morning. Let’s Bubble Watch.
For regular readers, for those of you that have been with us for years, who remember obscure references to jokes we made about Atantic 10 bubble teams in 2014, or whatever, the five words above will hopefully will you with an annual, ritualized dose of energy. Bubble Watch is back! Hell yes! You need no further introduction. You’re already digging in. Go, and enjoy.
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If you are new, well, here’s how it works: We write a ton of words about a ton of different college basketball teams. Probably we write too many words about these college basketball teams, but you’re free to ignore as many of them as you would like to. (We also use the royal we. No good reason why. It just stuck.) Ostensibly, we focus on these teams in relation to their chances of eventually receiving an at-large NCAA Tournament bid, but this early in the game this is really more of a catch-all column about every noteworthy team in college basketball. It has almost everything you need to know, if you are interested in knowing things. It is also (primarily?) a vector for bad jokes, borderline inappropriate gif usage, dumb running gags, and unhinged rants about the ultimate existential futility of Indiana men’s basketball.
As we go, it will get smaller, tighter, more rigid and more intently focused on the bubble. As we lock teams in, the actual bubble will come into focus. For now, though, it’s a big, heaping mess. (And today’s, for what it’s worth, might be the longest edition we’ve ever written.)
It is, for better or worse, the Bubble Watch. We love it. We love doing it. We hope you love it too.
A couple other ground rules:
• A lock is a lock. In other words, we are very careful calling teams locks, because we don’t want to say that and then have to reverse that stance; a lock should be basically guaranteed to make the tournament.
• Records are always up to date. NET and SOS numbers are current as of Monday night. Special thanks to Warren Nolan and, new this year, Bracketologists.com, whose NET schedule view (and tracking of canceled/postponed games) is already proving invaluable.
• If you don’t see a team you think should be on the page, there’s a chance we actually just forgot them. It does happen. Inquire within.
ACC
This is not a vintage edition of the Atlantic Coast Conference. That’s putting it gently, actually. Frankly, this league is just straight bad. The 2021-22 ACC has one definitely good team in Duke and one usually-pretty-good-and-maybe-getting-better team in North Carolina. The rest? Pass. Louisville is a generationally hot mess. Syracuse lost to Georgetown, LOL. Clemson, Notre Dame, Florida State and Virginia are all variously long-shot bubble hopefuls that may or may not get on this page eventually, but that’s a lot of mediocrity meeting mediocrity every night — part of the reason why actually sitting down with this league schedule on a daily basis can be a depressing experience. What’s that you say? Clemson is toughing out a road win at Boston College? Strong pass.
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It’s also a quantitative problem: In a large league with 1.5 truly quality team(s), there are disproportionately few crucial opportunities for any would-be bubblers to improve their chances between now and Selection Sunday. It’s going to take a long unbeaten run for anyone to emerge and make this 15-team jumbo league even a clear five-bid proposition.
Jokes about a one-bid ACC going around on Twitter are funny, but not all that realistic. For the ACC, though, four bids actually is a disaster. That is a realistic outcome. Even four bids might be pushing it. Blech. Gross.
Should be in: Duke
Work to do: North Carolina, Virginia Tech, Wake Forest, Miami
Duke (14-2, 4-1; NET: 12, SOS: 97): The other problem with having your power conference be this weak? There’s every chance your best team gets stuck in the muck. Led by as-good-as-advertised wing forward Paolo Banchero and a balanced batch of personnel around him, Duke did good work in the nonconference when it counted, which is to say it didn’t play the world’s toughest or most geographically interesting schedule but did beat Gonzaga and Kentucky on neutral courts, wins that in a normal season would have paired nicely with the ACC schedule and created a resume good enough to compete for a No. 1 seed. (The Kentucky win is starting to look great, by the way.) Instead, this year, almost any loss Duke takes in league play — like Jan. 8’s home loss to Miami — will chip away at their seed potential in ways that won’t apply to, say, Kentucky when the Wildcats lose to almost any of top 10 teams in the SEC. Meanwhile, every aggressively average team in the ACC will be targeting their Duke date(s) (even more so than usual) as their one big chance to finally turn this thing around. Also, at this early stage, the numbers here aren’t so good that a string of losses couldn’t at least put Duke in some slight jeopardy. They’ll get in eventually — but it could be a tough couple of months.
North Carolina (12-4, 4-1; NET: 32, SOS: 78): If the ACC is going to have another definite NCAA Tournament team in the mix, it’s going to be North Carolina, and frankly there are some positive signs here: After really struggling on the defensive end in nonconference play, UNC has opened its five league games playing the stingiest per-possession defense in the ACC. That sample is still pretty small, and playing offensively challenged teams like Virginia, Georgia Tech and Boston College skews the numbers slightly, but still: Kentucky beat this team 98-69 a week before Christmas. Being merely good defensively is promising progress. If that’s real, it will eventually translate into a resume that includes more than a home win over Michigan as the only Quadrant 1 or 2 victory. UNC is 0-4 against Q1, too. This week — at Miami Tuesday, at Wake Saturday — is Carolina’s first big chance to make the resume look a bit more reflective of the team’s on-court progress.
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Virginia Tech (9-7, 1-4; NET: 39, SOS: 70): Virginia Tech’s slow start to league play includes a home loss to NC State, and we want to be really clear here: Teams that plan to go to the 2022 NCAA Tournament should definitely not lose at home to NC State. Don’t do that. No bueno. That said, Tech has four Quadrant 2 wins, three of which came away from home in nonconference play, which combined with the workable NET number is why you’ll find this team reasonably close to the bubble in many bracket projections, especially after Saturday’s win over Notre Dame. Our view is that this is a pretty good team with a resume unfavorably damaged by a couple of close losses, particularly a one-point defeat to Xavier (NET: 16) Nov. 26, but also Jan. 12’s 54-52 heartbreaker at Virginia. If Tech can make it through trips to NC State and Boston College with wins this week, it’ll stay very much in the hunt in advance of next week’s trip to UNC. But that’s all Tech is right now — not in the bracket, but at least in the hunt.
Wake Forest (14-4, 4-3; NET: 49, SOS: 116): Sure, most of the ACC might be uninspiring and dull, but carve out a special place in your heart for Wake Forest, one of the surprise teams of the 2021-22 season. This program sank to desperate lows in the past, oh, decade or so; if the Jeff Bzdelik era was grim, Danny Manning’s tenure didn’t do much to lift Deacs’ fans spirits. (There was one NCAA Tournament bid, anyway, so Wake had that going for it, which was nice, etc.) A year ago, former East Tennessee State coach and fellow native Iowan Steve Forbes laid his cultural foundations in relative obscurity. Wake finished ranked 175th in adjusted efficiency. This year, all of a sudden — thanks in large part to the ability to build through the portal, which all fans of rebuilding teams should totally embrace for exactly this reason — Wake is a borderline top-50 team with a real chance of making the NCAA Tournament, exactly the kind of fun surprise this version of the ACC desperately needed. So: Can they pull this off? The biggest area of long-term concern is Wake’s nonconference schedule, which ranks 313th, and which is the kind of thing a) ahead-of-schedule rebuilding programs do in years where they don’t expect to have to worry about NCAA Tournament resume numbers just yet and b) the selection committee routinely punishes. But we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. For now, Forbes and Co. are very much on track.
Miami (13-4, 5-1; NET: 84, SOS: 85): You know what helps? Winning at Duke. Winning at Duke in the Coach K era is basically always a massive boost to your NCAA Tournament odds. How many mid-tier bubble teams have declared themselves definitely in the field after a win over — let alone at — Duke over the years? It’s a genre of win unto itself. Of course, it’s never exactly that simple; you have to do stuff other than win at Duke to expect to get in the field. In Miami’s case, you have to play some defense. Horrendous defense was what cost them nonconference games against Dayton and UCF (when it allowed 95 points in 74 possessions, which, yikes) and horrendous defense against now-six-loss Alabama likely had a disproportionate impact on this ugly NET rating you see above. Even in their nine-game winning streak in December and January they were mostly outscoring teams, rather than actually stopping them. This has been the ACC’s most efficient offensive team to date. If they can tighten up on the other end, the wins will keep coming — and they’ll wind up fixing that disqualifyingly bad NET rating in the process.
American
Yes, there’s still a separate section for the American Athletic Conference in this Bubble Watch. Why? We’re honestly not sure. Well, actually, we are sure: The last time we tried to get rid of it, American fans pitched such an almighty fit that we stopped trying to argue our very reasonable case (having the six power conferences and one big section for everyone else is a much more obvious and elegant presentation) and just gave in to the demands of the mob. Here we are, several years later, not even daring to change the format. Cyberbullying really works.
Which is especially funny this year, because there’s a real chance this ends up being a one-bid league. Cincinnati is in the fringe mix, and SMU might make a case with a win at Memphis Thursday night, but right now it’s Memphis, of all teams — hilarious, ridiculous, players-still-under-that-MATA-bus-Penny-chucked-them-beneath Memphis — that might still be this league’s best chance of anyone other than Houston getting in the bracket come March. The AAC is relying on Memphis! This is not a good sign!
Mark this well, American fans: We reserve the right to remove this section and stick Houston down in the Others category at any point this season if we get sufficiently fed up. You’ve been warned.
Should be in: Houston
Work to do: Cincinnati, Memphis
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Houston (15-2, 4-0; NET: 4, SOS: 151): Houston is functionally a lock, but we’re holding off on the permanent-ink formality for now. Chalk it up to AAC tax, where building on a resume with exactly one Quadrant 1 win (versus Oklahoma State on a neutral court) is slightly more difficult than it will be once the Cougars join the Big 12. Eight of UH’s 15 wins land in Quadrant 3, there are at least five chances for bad losses still on the regular-season schedule, and Houston is playing (thus far successfully, but still) without Marcus Sasser and Tramon Mark. So far so good, but the Cougars barely got out of Tulsa (Q3) with a win Saturday and have a Q4 fixture (home versus South Florida) Tuesday night.
Cincinnati (12-5, 3-2; NET: 59, SOS: 134): Of course, Memphis jokes aside, the Bearcats currently boast this league’s second-best NET number. Congratulations to any team who could pounce on Illinois early in the season, when it was struggling badly, and Cincinnati definitely did that — a 71-51 win over the-now-No. 10-NET-ranked Illini looks gorgeous on any resume. Unfortunately, Wes Miller’s first Bearcats team also lost home games to Monmouth and Tulane. This is a fringe bubble team right now, but that Illinois win is a foundational result you can build a strong at-large case around — particularly if, like Cincinnati, you’re playing solid-enough basketball to boot. We’ll see.
Memphis (9-7, 3-3; NET: 63: SOS: 67): There will be time to talk in greater detail about the linear insanity of Memphis’s season, the way it has progressed from one wild extreme to the other — the huge hype at the beginning of the year, the early signs of talent and progress, the disastrous four-game losing streak in late November and December, Penny Hardaway’s incredible quotes to Seth Davis about his apparently toxic locker room, the old guys being bad influences, Emoni Bates asking to play fewer minutes, the rousing turnaround in a home blowout over Alabama, the immediate road loss to Tulane that followed, three solid wins over Wichita State, Tulsa and Cincinnati, back-to-back losses against UCF and ECU. As a matter of narrative progression, Memphis’s 2021-22 season has been totally insane. Take those results out of order and spread them across a team sheet and you get … an inconsistent bubble team, which is practically redundant, because all of them are. Couple of good wins, couple of terrible losses, a mixed bag in Quadrant 2. Yep. That’s a bubble team. At best. For all of the drama and all of the jokes, Hardaway’s teams have typically quietly gotten better during the season. This team needs to follow that pattern, and fast, or it’ll be another year with no tourney in Memphis.
Big 12
How good is this Big 12? Extremely good. More precisely, in terms of average adjusted efficiency margin (which is how Ken Pomeroy tracks and ranks league strength, for what it’s worth) the 2021-22 edition of this league compares favorably to the 2020-21 Big Ten that had everyone (ourselves included, to be fair) going all over the top a year ago. Indeed, the last time the Big 12 was this brutal on a pound-for-pound basis was probably 2016-17, when every team in the league fell inside the top 70 in adjusted efficiency. This Big 12 has just two teams outside the top 60 — TCU and Kansas State — both of whom currently reside in the top 63. Everyone else is a top-50 team or better, with everyone save West Virginia and Oklahoma State looking like a top 30 outfit. Point is, for as much as coaches will lament the nightly difficulty of life in the Big 12 — and high levels are hard sustain, for sure — there is functionally no such thing as a bad loss in this league. As such, barring lengthy streaks of wins or losses, most teams’ current NCAA Tournament at-large position is going to be pretty secure for the next couple months. Baylor and Kansas start out as locks. Others will join them soon enough.
Locks: Baylor, Kansas
Should be in: Texas, Texas Tech, Iowa State, West Virginia
Work to do: Oklahoma, TCU
Texas (13-4, 3-2; NET: 14, SOS: 71): Texas has one more nonconference game, against Tennessee, in the Big 12/SEC Challenge. This is very good news, because Texas’s nonconference schedule was trash. Yes, the Longhorns went and took their lumps at Gonzaga, but their only other nonconference games of any quality was at Seton Hall. The rest, all at home, go like this: Northern Colorado (NET: 187), Sam Houston State (234), California Baptist (236), San Jose State (258), UTRGV (261), Alabama State (306), Incarnate Word (346), Arkansas Pine-Bluff (351), Houston Baptist (352). Look at that! Just look at it! It’s absolutely terrible! Who schedules three teams ranked 346th or worse?! Why do this to yourself? Why create this drag on your schedule such that you could end up in minor trouble if your season goes sideways later on? Also, why not give Texas fans at least one more decent home opponent in November or December? It probably won’t matter in the end; being in this Big 12 means your schedule is bound to be tough, and this team is good enough to be a solid tournament team, even a lock, sooner rather than later, even if it’s only decent win away from home to date came at K-State. Still, we just can’t get over that nonconference home schedule. Just incredible stuff.
Texas Tech (13-4, 3-2; NET: 17, SOS: 21): Texas Tech is a perfect avatar for the hard-edged, dust-bitten difficulty of life in the Big 12. In the past two weeks, Texas Tech went to Iowa State with seven available players and lost 51-47 in one of the uglier, tougher games you’ll ever see. Three days later, it went home and knocked off Kansas, then went to Baylor and smothered the Bears, then blew out Oklahoma State, then … lost by double-digits in Manhattan, Kan., after scoring 51 points in 66 trips. When it doesn’t go horribly cold on the offensive end, Tech is a devastating force; the Watch watched a huge share of the possessions in each game mentioned above, and it can think of maybe five or seven actually easy buckets for Mark Adams’s opponents. His defense really works, the kids playing it play hard as hell, and the idea of Tech employing it for 14 more regular season games between now and March 5 just sounds completely exhausting on every level. It will be fun, though.
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Iowa State (14-3, 2-3; NET: 20, SOS: 18): Say hello to the pleasant surprise of the season. Iowa State came into 2021-22 having gone 2-22 a year ago, in former coach Steve Prohm’s final season, ranked 113th in KenPom’s preseason rankings, with a fully transfer portal-filled roster no one really knew what to do with — except make vague noises about Iowa State probably being the worst team in the league by default. Not so! The Cyclones are great! T.J. Otzelberger’s first team is playing top-five defense nationally, based on a system of high-pressure turnover generation combined with elite first-shot defense. It’s working, even on nights when ISU’s offense struggles (see 51-47 versus Texas Tech), and when the Cyclones don’t turn it over offensively they’re extremely difficult to make up ground against. One bucket here and there, and this team would also have a win at Kansas and might be a lock already. With wins over Texas, Xavier, Tech, Iowa and at Creighton, they’re well on their way already.
West Virginia (13-3, 2-2; NET: 44, SOS: 48): Bob Huggins’ teams at West Virginia — and this is his 15th, if you can believe it — have typically gone one of two ways: really good, or not in the tournament at all. There’s been much more of the former than the latter, of course, but when Huggs’ teams haven’t come together for whatever reason, when they haven’t been top-20 or top-10 good, they’re typically all the way bad. This season is something pretty new. The Mountaineers have very little claim to be a Top 25 team — their NET number above is also exactly where KenPom ranks them, just a few spots below where they check in on ESPN’s Basketball Power Index (38th) — and yet they would be easily, solidly in the NCAA Tournament right now. Beating UConn Dec. 8 has proven to be a marquee win, even at home, and Dec. 18’s win at UAB (NET: 42) doesn’t look so shabby either. West Virginia has gotten blown out a couple of times in the league so far, including Saturday at Kansas, which was not a competitive contest, but none of these are bad losses. We’ll see how it goes, but right now they’d be in the field.
Oklahoma (12-5, 2-3; NET: 35, SOS: 49): The Sooners are under new management, in the form of former Loyola Chicago coach Porter Moser, which means their typical staid bubble-ish reliability under Lon Kruger (at least post-Buddy Hield) should give way to something a bit more … exciting. What’s that? Oklahoma’s resume would make it a No. 8 seed if the tournament was seeded and selected today? Alas. There is room for growth here: OU’s loss to TCU over the weekend came by way of 20 turnovers in 71 possessions, a yearlong problem that has totally derailed Oklahoma’s otherwise functional offense, and one that Moser’s teams in Chicago never suffered from. If he can tidy even just that bit up, the Sooners should be a more consistently tough out than they’ve already sporadically proven to be.
TCU (12-2, 2-1; NET: 53, SOS: 166): We went in on Texas’s schedule above, but TCU’s nonconference schedule was truly putrid. The NET strength of schedule number for the noncon portion right now: 329th. Not great, Jamie! It’s why there just isn’t a lot to go on here. Yes, TCU is 12-2, and yes that looks tidy enough at first glance, but nine of those wins came against Quadrants 3 and 4 and TCU is just 3-2 in its other five games, including a neutral-court loss to (a pretty good) Santa Clara. Good news: LSU comes to town Jan. 29. That’s as big of a game, if not bigger, than any of the big hitters the Big 12 will put in the Horned Frogs’ way — a chance to redeem a mostly squandered nonconference period.
Big East
We admit: We came in to this section thinking Villanova wouldn’t be a lock yet. Maybe we still have the sting of that 57-36 embarrassment at Baylor stuck top of mind, or the way Villanova — despite playing well in both games — eventually came up short (and maybe even short-handed) against both UCLA and Purdue. But anyone who has lost track of Villanova in the past couple of weeks should take note: The Wildcats are very much back on their bull—. In their case, this translates to “thoroughly owning the rest of the Big East,” wherein they’ve rebounded from Dec. 17’s blowout loss at Creighton by beating Xavier twice, getting a huge victory at Seton Hall, returning the favor to the Bluejays, and then last weekend beating Butler 82-42. This rotation is going deeper, the perimeter shooting is still on point, Villanova has the No. 3 NET and the No. 1 schedule in the country, and the Big East remains as deeply in its grasp as ever. The king stay the king.
Locks: Villanova
Should be in: Connecticut, Xavier, Seton Hall, Providence
Work to do: Marquette, Creighton
Connecticut (11-4, 2-2; NET: 15, SOS: 35): UConn has traded wins for losses for more than a month now, which has left it with a slightly messy team sheet, but broadly speaking there’s very little to be worried about and a lot to be encouraged by. The Huskies came through a period of injuries with minimal long-term damage. They are still the only team to beat Auburn, which is massive. All of their losses — by four to Michigan State, three to Seton Hall, three at West Virginia, four versus Providence — have been close, winnable affairs. Meanwhile, none of those defeats is remotely “bad.” Providence lands in Q2, but that same Providence team won at Wisconsin. Putting opponents away a bit earlier, with a bit less drama (UConn also needed OT to beat St. John’s last Wednesday) would be a welcome change for UConn’s fans, but otherwise, this campaign is progressing about as well as you might reasonably expect.
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Xavier (13-3, 3-2; NET: 16, SOS: 24): The Musketeers appear unable to beat Villanova. That’s OK; most teams can’t. Grabbing three Quadrant 1 wins in nonconference play (home versus Ohio State, neutral versus Virginia Tech, at Oklahoma State) constitutes a good start to the season anyway, and that’s before you get to the blowout win over Cincinnati or the otherwise (i.e. non-Villanova-related) successful start to league competition. The only losses here came to the Wildcats and Iowa State, which, it turns out, is really good. At least so far, this is a real return to form for the Musketeeers, a much-needed reestablishing of top-20-level performance that Travis Steele has been searching for in the three uneven, tourney-free years that began his tenure. It feels like this program has finally turned a corner.
Seton Hall (10-5, 2-4; NET: 30, SOS: 10): Michigan being bad is a bummer not just for Wolverines fans, but also almost as much for Seton Hall. On Nov. 16, so early in the 2021-22 season, the Pirates’ rousing 67-65 win at Michigan looked like one of the marquee nonconference victories of the year. Instead, Juwan Howard’s team is 7-7, and beating Michigan is downright mundane. Indeed, Seton Hall has started to come back down to Earth just a smidge since the start of league play, with last week’s back-to-back narrow losses at DePaul and Marquette sullying what had otherwise been a pretty tidy team sheet. In particular, giving up 96 points in 82 trips in Chicago felt ominous; if this team isn’t the top-tier defensive unit it appeared to be earlier in the campaign, SHU’s inability to reliably make shots might curtail its aspirations somewhat. Still: great start to the season, with good stuff to build on.
Providence (14-2, 4-1; NET: 33, SOS: 39): What’s this? Can it be? Providence safely in the bracket in the first Bubble Watch edition of a new season? Providence not sporting some ungodly mid-90s NET rating that would disqualify them if they hadn’t also beaten two top-five teams on the road? Providence getting to Big East play without losing to four sub-150 teams at home? What Providence is this? None we can recognize. Friars fans will prefer this much less hectic edition of Ed Cooley’s program, no doubt. There is still some of that old unpredictability; a team with 14 wins and victories over Texas Tech, at Wisconsin (without Johnny Davis, but still), UConn and Seton Hall has had two truly terrible outings this season — a 58-40 loss against Virginia and an 88-56 defeat at Marquette. When Providence loses, it loses. But it doesn’t lose very often.
Marquette (12-6, 4-3; NET: 41, SOS: 15): The Big East’s answer to Iowa State, another of the feel-good surprises of the 2021-22 season. No, Marquette’s comeback isn’t quite as drastic and unforeseen as Iowa State’s — the Golden Eagles were merely mediocre last year, as opposed to 2-22 disastrous — but in they are nonetheless succeeding beyond all expectations in the first year of a new coach’s tenure. We don’t know about you, but we sort of (not unlike Iowa State early on) assumed Marquette would have faded away by now. Nice win over Illinois and all, but come on. Time to get back in your box. And for a minute there — when Marquette lost to UCLA, Xavier, UConn and Creighton and fell to 8-6 — that looked exactly like what was happening. Since then, Shaka Smart’s first MU team has won four in a row. Two have come against Georgetown (which is terrible) and DePaul (which is very beatable, especially at home), but blowing out Providence and holding off Seton Hall are no mean feats. The Golden Eagles aren’t going anywhere.
Creighton (10-5, 2-2; NET: 55, SOS: 11): The Arizona State loss hurts. We don’t like to start with negativity, but, sorry, we can’t get past it. It sticks out on Creighton’s team sheet like one of those unsightly deep-red pimples we still occasionally get on our forehead despite being fully grown and well past the point of such youthful dermatological folly. It’s Quadrant 4, at home. It looks bad. Other than that, this is a tourney-worthy team sheet, including the massive blowout win over Villanova on Dec. 17 (a week after Villanova got run by Baylor and looked totally bereft of confidence in Omaha) and a neutral court win over BYU. One loss is one loss, so it’s not that big of a deal, but we can’t help but imagine this team sheet without “H, Arizona State, 57-58” on it.
Big Ten
We have it on fairly good authority that at various points this season Purdue fans have engaged in a bit of — how should we put this — mass collective freakout. Dec. 9’s road loss to Rutgers and Jan. 3’s home defeat to Wisconsin were similar in some slightly unnerving ways, namely in Purdue’s inability to stop the opposing team’s stars (especially Johnny Davis, who had 37 and 14 in West Lafayette) from doing whatever they wanted down the stretch. Having begun the season with national title aspirations, and having affirmed them in nonconference play, Purdue fans were suddenly wondering if maybe this team is just a better version of what it already was. It wasn’t a fun thought.
Hopefully, Monday afternoon’s win in Illinois will calm things down. The 96-88 win in Champaign was not only one of the most entertaining and best-played games of the season, but it was also an affirmation that the Boilermakers have an elite gear they can get to — a punch they can take in a way very few teams can. How many other teams in college hoops would have absorbed Andre Curbelo’s breakout return? Would have dealt with the U of I crowd? Would have been unable to close the game out in regulation and the first overtime and still knuckled down in the closing minutes of OT No. 2? This team is different, especially on the offensive end, and whether it takes a few more lumps in league play or not, we remain as convinced as ever that Purdue will be there at the end.
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Locks: Purdue
Should be in: Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan State, Ohio State
Work to do: Iowa, Indiana, Minnesota
Illinois (13-4, 6-1; NET: 10, SOS: 69): You know a game is good when you walk away thinking, “Man, the losing team is really freaking good.” (Our favorite in this genre is the 2014 Kentucky-Wichita State second-round matchup when everyone who had previously said undefeated Wichita State was overrated turned around and was like, “wow, Wichita State is actually awesome” even though the Shockers lost the game.) So it was for Illinois Monday. We always expected the Illini, who have figured things out since some early stumbles against Marquette and Cincinnati, to give Purdue a go at home, but it was Curbelo’s hugely impressive return from a long concussion hiatus that took things up to 11. If Curbelo can play like that — creative and a little wild, but ultimately under control — in the structure Brad Underwood built out in his absence, then the Illini might compete for a national title after all.
Wisconsin (14-2, 5-1; NET: 18, SOS: 8): You know what’s a really good sign? Johnny Davis didn’t play well last week, and Wisconsin still won. For most of the season, the Badgers have ridden their sophomore’s meteoric rise to almost all of their success. When Davis has played well, like in his legendary performance at Purdue, there was nothing UW couldn’t do; when he has played poorly, or not at all (as in the home loss to Providence) Wisconsin has looked very average. But after an incredible first week of January, Davis shot a combined 11-of-37 last week against Maryland and Ohio State … and the Badgers won both games anyway. This is an excellent sign, because as good as Davis is, sustaining this fantastic, surprising start will require more than just one dude.
Michigan State (14-3, 5-1; NET: 23, SOS: 25): After losing to Baylor on Nov. 26, Michigan State went on a nine-game winning streak that, as lengthy winning streaks tend to, led to MSU gently and quietly creeping upwards in the polls, to the point where people were talking about them as a solid top-10 team. Nine wins in a row against any competition is impressive enough, but none of the teams MSU beat in that backloaded Big Ten schedule stretch (save maybe Northwestern in Evanston) were really impressive in and of themselves, which is maybe why last Saturday’s turnaround home defeat to those same aforementioned Wildcats wasn’t quite as surprising as it seemed to be for some. Frankly, this is a team that still turns the ball over way, way, way too much. Tom Izzo is generally culturally OK with turnovers, within reason, but the number of empty possessions this year is really high, and when combined with a defense that doesn’t force any turnovers of its own, it stacks the shot-volume math against Michigan State in a major way. It’s not a crisis, but it is something this team has to get sorted out as it prepares for the teeth of its Big Ten schedule. Things only get harder from here.
Ohio State (11-4, 5-2; NET: 25, SOS: 7): E.J. Liddell remains an extremely fun player to watch, in that he still has a ton of smooth offensive game in areas of the floor (namely the midrange and extended post areas) that most guys his size don’t even try to play in anymore. It’s awesome. This season, he’s even better at all of that stuff, and he’s also become of the best shot blockers in the country, while also extending his 3-point shooting volume and averaging nearly 40 percent from beyond the arc. Awesome player, and the main reason this Ohio State team is well on its way to another casual NCAA Tournament appearance, despite all of the crucial personnel it lost.
Iowa (13-4, 3-3; NET: 19, SOS: 42): Iowa is 0-4 against Quadrant 1 opposition, not something we would have expected coming in to this exercise but a true fact nonetheless. A home win over Indiana sits just outside that marker, and if the Hoosiers keep up their defensive performances they might creep up into Quadrant 1 eventually. If not, oh well; the Big Ten will offer Keegan Murray and this latest smooth-operating Hawkeyes offense more than their fair share of big win chances.
Indiana (13-4, 4-3; NET: 34, SOS: 120): The good news: Indiana got its first road win of the season Monday night. The bad news: It happened at Nebraska. Alas, they all count, though some count more than others, and while it’s better not to have a “0” in the road wins column, doing it at Nebraska hardly inspires a ton of confidence. The other good news for Indiana is that its underlying numbers are better than its resume: This is a really good defensive team, maybe the Big Ten’s best, getting a fully committed two-way performance from Trayce Jackson-Davis, who isn’t just putting up numbers on the offensive end but is totally locked in defensively, too. If that keeps up, the wins will come, though IU’s absolutely atrocious nonconference schedule (rank: 340!) will depress its overall resume for the rest of the season.
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Minnesota (10-5, 1-5; NET: 76; SOS: 26): Hang in there, Minnesota! You can do it! The Golden Gophers were one of the most enjoyable revelations of the nonconference season, the product of a first-year coach piecing together a roster from a group of mid-major transfers looking for high-major chances on short notice. And it totally worked: Minnesota started the year 10-1, won at Mississippi State and Michigan (before everyone realized Michigan was maybe kind of bad) and became minor media darlings. Unfortunately, things are starting to fall apart. The January schedule hasn’t been friendly — lots of teams would lose four in a row to Illinois, at Indiana, at Michigan State and to Iowa — and Minnesota nearly knocked off the Spartans in East Lansing. But all of a sudden Ben Johnson’s team is 1-5 in the league and needs to beat Penn State and Rutgers this week to avoid talk about a full-on collapse.
Pac-12
The Pac-12 has suffered a lot of slander in this space over the years. Some of it has even been deserved. There have been some bad versions of this league in the last decade. But this Pac-12 is fun! Sure, there isn’t much in the way of bubble depth — although Oregon, after a disastrous start, seems determined to change that — but UCLA and USC are both excellent teams and Arizona is a bona fide national title contender. Indeed, the Wildcats were thoroughly overlooked in the whole “who deserves to be No. 1?!” debate that broke out this week despite having just one loss (at Tennessee) and a road win at Illinois. The Wildcats are an early No. 1 seed shout, anyway, a status they’ll have to work hard to preserve but which the twin presences of UCLA and USC will help with. And any matchup of two of those three teams is going to be more fun than anything the ACC can cobble together this year, maybe outside of Duke-UNC, maybe not even then. Way to go, Pac-12!
Lock: Arizona
Should be in: UCLA, USC
Work to do: Oregon
UCLA (11-2, 3-1; NET: 21, SOS: 80): The Bruins have already had one of the sport’s lengthier COVID-19 layoffs: Between Dec. 11’s win at Marquette and Jan. 6’s win over Long Beach State, UCLA didn’t play a game. That stretch also cost them a neutral-court nonconference contest against North Carolina (which ended up playing against, and getting absolutely run by, Kentucky) that would have added a little more top-40 heft to a slightly lightweight schedule. UCLA’s win over Villanova is going to hold it in good stead all year, and that road win at Marquette — which was an impressively mature performance from start to finish, especially defensively, and in the way the Bruins took a rabid crowd out of the game early — is holding its value. We’ll also assume last week’s home loss to Oregon won’t look questionable for long, either. Assuming nothing goes totally haywire in league play, UCLA will coast to the tournament, its single-digit seed ultimately determined by how well it performs against Arizona and USC.
USC (14-2, 4-2; NET: 28, SOS: 215): You can see the immediate problem with USC’s resume right there in the top line: schedule strength, or lack thereof. In some mitigation, the Trojans did have a game against Oklahoma State (in Oklahoma City — so neutral, but not really) canceled just before Christmas, but that game would hardly have rescued what was otherwise a truly ugly nonconference slate, one that ranks 317th in Division I, which, yuck. The Trojans got one Q1 game out of it: versus San Diego State, a 58-43 win. They played at Temple (NET: 123), which sneaks in Quadrant 2. Everything else was down in the dregs, and as such USC managed to float toward the top 15 and top 10 in the AP poll without accumulating a truly quality win. Last week’s losses to Stanford and Oregon have brought things back to Earth. Andy Enfield’s team needs to tread water for its next six games, none of which are going to cure the schedule-strength blues, before Feb. 5 at Arizona and Feb. 12 at home versus UCLA.
Oregon (10-6, 4-2; NET: 60, SOS: 20): True story: Until last weekend, this all-important honorary “let’s find another Pac-12 team worth talking about!” space had Stanford’s name on it. The Cardinal even snuck on the bubble in Brian Bennett’s latest bracket! Huzzah! Everything was coming up Jerod Haase! Then they went to Seattle, got beat by a terrible Washington team, and fell all the way to 90th in the NET, which is way outside the range of viability for at-large hopefuls. Sorry, Stanford. Maybe another time? Instead, we’ve turned our attentions to Oregon, which began the season in abject fashion. After Dec. 18’s (hard-fought!) home loss to Baylor, Oregon was 5-6 with a home L to Arizona State. They’ve won five games since, but the two that really matter came last week, both on the road, back to back at UCLA and USC. At 10-6 with two marquee true road victories now on the sheet, Oregon suddenly looks like the most likely at-large candidate in the rest of the league, which is actually in line with what we all thought coming in to the year, too. Like life, Dana Altman always finds a way.
SEC
The Bubble Watch likes to think of itself primarily as a public service, and so we just want to say, for anyone who only watches their favorite team play and doesn’t necessarily seek out other games or other leagues or whatever (these people do exist, and they do read Bubble Watch): watch Auburn. Seriously. Watch Auburn. They’re so good. Beyond being good, though, they’re just really fun, uptempo and freewheeling and not super-structured or over-rehearsed, but frenetic in that way that most Bruce Pearl teams are, playing sort of like he coaches, red-faced and bursting at the seams. This season, that typically frantic affect blends beautifully with the smooth genius of Jabari Smith, who is an unfair basketball alien capable of the effortlessly sublime. Seriously. Not joking here. Watch Auburn. Thank us later.
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The best bit is that while Auburn may have skated by without much elite competition in the nonconference (although Loyola Chicago has turned out to be an excellent team and an excellent win for the Tigers, and Murray State isn’t far off*) we now get to watch them try to pick their way through an absolutely brutal 2021-22 SEC. They’re more than up for it — having coasted past a very good and also locked-in LSU team already — it’s going to be thrilling to watch, starting with Kentucky’s arrival Saturday. Hell yes.
(*Wanted to make sure to mention these quality wins before Auburn fans turned this comment section into Jesse Newell’s Twitter mentions. Sheesh! Also, what’s with the color gradient thing on all of those memes? Why do they all look so bad? Step it up, Zoomers.)
Locks: Auburn, LSU
Should be in: Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama
Work to do: Florida, Mississippi State, Texas A&M, Arkansas
Kentucky (14-3, 4-1; NET: 11, SOS: 92): Kentucky’s resume still suffers from a little bit of uptake lag. While the wins and losses here are merely good, the manner in which they’ve been achieved — having already blown out UNC 98-69, Kentucky just beat Tennessee 107-79, a win that elevated the Wildcats to No. 4 in the KenPom.com and BPI rankings — speaks to a higher level of quality than this team sheet indicates. Oscar Tshiebwe is the best rebounder in the country, a statistical force unlike anything we’ve seen in a long time, and now that freshman guard TyTy Washington is figuring things out up top, all of the pieces around Tshiebwe are starting to click satisfyingly into place. Scary team playing great basketball right now. Will be locked sooner rather than later.
Tennessee (11-5, 2-3; NET: 13, SOS: 4): When it comes to assessing teams, we can sometimes get a little too caught up in isolated results, particularly big wins. Resumes are taken as a whole, one game is only one game, etc. It’s always worth reminding ourselves of this. Still: If it weren’t for a few bounces against Arizona on Dec. 22, the Wildcats would be unbeaten and the clear No. 1 team in the country for several weeks running, and Tennessee would have a slightly dicey resume on its hands. Fortunately for the Vols, they held on to that win, which gives them a genuinely elite victory alongside a raft of five defeats to the other quality opponents on their schedule. (A neutral-court win against North Carolina aside.) This team is 2-5 against Quadrant 1 and just 1-0 against Quadrant 2, and just 2-3 since that win over Arizona — including last week’s 28-point blowout loss to Kentucky.
Alabama (11-6, 2-3; NET: 24, SOS: 2): To their credit, the Crimson Tide have played an utterly brutal schedule, up to and including a hastily arranged game against Davidson Dec. 21, a game which Davidson impressively won. The benefits of being willing to play people paid off massively at the top of this team sheet: Alabama went to Seattle and handed Gonzaga a 91-82 drubbing that wasn’t really that close, and its home-and-home with Houston brought the Cougars to town for a thrilling (and controversial) one-point win. But Alabama has also been inconsistent. Losing at Missouri is basically inexcusable, because Missouri is really bad at basketball. Losing at Memphis three days after the Houston win felt a bit weird, given how uninspired and flat Nate Oats’s team was. Bama may not be the locked-in top-10 force we assumed after Gonzaga and Houston in the way they were a year ago, but those wins did hand them a pretty unimpeachable spot in the bracket. It would take a meltdown of epic proportions to meaningfully alter this trajectory.
Florida (10-6, 1-3; NET: 46, SOS: 57): We’ve had some fun at Florida’s expense in the Mike White era, mostly on account of Florida being pretty average most years, but also on account of Florida kind of broadly failing to establish any sort of meaningful identity as a basketball program — of just sort of floating along. You could maybe levy that charge at these Gators, too. Indeed, Florida is usually in possession of much more impressive resume numbers at this stage of the season. This is especially lackluster stuff, particularly when you throw in the 224th-ranked nonconference schedule. Woof. Losing to Maryland and Texas Southern is pretty inexcusable. Thing is, every time we watch this Florida team play, we think there’s a pretty decent team in there, just one that isn’t good enough to not get eaten alive in this edition of the SEC. This would be the third-best team in the ACC by some distance. It gave Auburn a real test at Auburn and nearly knocked off LSU. Colin Castleton is good. There’s something here. But in this league, this year, whatever it is simply might not be good enough.
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Mississippi State (12-4, 3-1; NET: 48, SOS: 232): Strap it in. We’re here for the long haul. Mississippi State is basically God’s own bubble team: workable NET number, horrible schedule strength fueled by an awful nonconference slate (one that included just one non Q3/Q4 opponent, though it’s not MSU’s fault Louisville turned out to be so terrible), high-major league affiliation with tons of opportunities to a) lose games but also b) get big wins. That said, this state of affairs is actually better than where the Bulldogs have tended to find themselves in recent seasons, when they’ve usually started well outside the bubble picture and only slowly (and usually quietly) worked themselves into the mix during SEC play. Ben Howland’s teams are tough, and they get better, and if this one follows that trajectory it might hoist itself up and off the bubble. Lot of season left. But right now, this is the platonic ideal of a bubble team.
Texas A&M (14-2, 4-0; NET: 51, SOS: 278): Don’t be alarmed. That low rumbling sound you hear is merely the Buzz Williams Texas A&M project getting off the ground in earnest — and right on time, too. It was this way at Virginia Tech, too, which was dead and buried when Williams showed up in 2014-15. A year later, Williams had elevated Tech from 175th in adjusted efficiency to 63rd. A year after that, they were in the tournament. A&M has had a slightly less linear trajectory, and COVID didn’t help, but look now: The Aggies are 14-2 and unbeaten in the league. Caveats apply, namely that A&M hasn’t beaten anyone better than Arkansas and generally hasn’t played any good teams, period. Wisconsin is it, and the Aggies lost that game. This schedule is horrendous. But this team is playing some decent basketball and will have plenty of chances in the league. Williams will probably get this group to the cusp of the tournament field, if not in it, and either way it’ll be impressive enough.
Arkansas (12-5, 2-3; NET: 56, SOS: 113): Last Saturday was a breakthrough moment. The Razorbacks have been one of the bigger disappointments of the season; they simply haven’t come together in the way Eric Musselman expected, and their early lack of quality opposition got Hogs fans all hot and bothered before there was anything meaningful to judge against. (Tight-ish wins over Cincinnati and K-State on neutral floors do not a nonconference schedule make). Then Arkansas got battered by Oklahoma, lost at home to Hofstra, and tipped off SEC play with three straight losses, including at home to Vanderbilt. Not the ideal start. Saturday, though, was huge, a road win at LSU as good as almost anything any other bubble team has done this season. It’s the start of what will have to be a long, determined comeback into the bracket, if the Razorbacks do intend to get there.
Others
By this stage, you’ve already read a lot of Bubble Watch. Good for you! There are a lot of teams in this section. Good for the mid-majors! Let’s keep this bit short and sweet, then, and just say that Gonzaga is a lock to make the 2022 men’s NCAA Tournament. There. Easy. Now on to the rest. (Inhales deeply …)
Locks: Gonzaga
Should be in: Loyola Chicago, BYU
Work to do: Wyoming, Colorado State, Murray State, Davidson, San Francisco, Saint Mary’s, Belmont, UAB, San Diego State, Boise State, Iona, VCU, St. Bonaventure
Loyola Chicago (12-2, 4-0; NET: 22, SOS: 110): When Porter Moser left for Oklahoma last spring, you could have forgiven Loyola Chicago fans for ruefully accepting that their moment had passed — that their little Jesuit school’s thrilling dalliance with the upper echleon of men’s college hoops had officially reached its end. Instead, under first-time head coach Drew Valentine, Loyola Chicago returned almost all of its key players from last year’s devastating team — star center Cameron Krutwig left, but that’s it — and came back barely diminished in the slightest. This team doesn’t defend like last year’s did, but it is scoring the ball more efficiently. Missing out on a road trip to Davidson (which was canceled) hurt the schedule, but organizing a neutral court game with San Francisco in a junior college gym in Utah was a total stroke of genius, and the win that resulted will hold Loyola Chicago in good stead if and when it slips up in the Valley.
BYU (13-4, 4-2; NET: 26, SOS: 40): Strength of schedule numbers are fickle beasts. Sometimes you can see The Matrix right there on the page, sometimes not. In BYU’s case, this nonconference schedule feels tougher than 105th even if the Cougars didn’t play a Quadrant 1 opponent in the non-league portion; they did, after all, play eight Q2 teams, and just five nonconference games in Quadrants 3 and 4 combined. Well done, BYU. There is typically plenty of time to stock up on the latter kinds of wins in WCC play, although this year the emergence of San Francisco as the league’s legit fourth team gives BYU et al. yet another quality win opportunity in the mix — which the Cougars seized Saturday, in fact, in their 71-69 win at the Sobrato Center. Mark Pope’s team is in a very solid spot.
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Wyoming (11-2, 1-0; NET: 27, SOS: 115): Yes, this NET feels stunningly high, relative to the results Wyoming has actually put together, which basically boil down to road wins at Grand Canyon and Utah State, both of which rank in the low 60s in the NET, and thus both of which count as Quad 1 victories. Fair enough, but it’s worth noting the NET is by far the highest on the Cowboys: BPI has them at 98th (!!), while Pomeroy somewhat splits the difference at 70th. The Mountain West is deeper than in recent years and has quality teams in the mix, and Wyoming still has games against Boise State, Colorado State (twice), Fresno State and a return game with Utah State still to put more quality wins on the board. But it will also have to sustain this lofty position in a league also filled with Quadrant 4 traps. The 27th-best team in the country could do it. The 70th might not. Either way, it won’t be easy, and we’ll soon find out which is which.
Colorado State (12-1, 3-1; NET: 29, SOS: 186): Colorado State, on the other hand, has emerged from nonconference (and the early stages of league play) with not only one loss, but with a couple of name-brand wins over potential fellow bubble teams (Mississippi State, Creighton, Saint Mary’s) and far less metrics-related disagreement on the actual quality of the team here. This team is perhaps the nation’s foremost purveyor of buckets, particularly from beyond the arc, even if the Rams have cooled off a little bit from their incredibly hot start to the year. (They completely cooked Creighton on Nov. 21 to the tune of 95 points in 71 trips. Things have normalized a bit since.) Let’s just say we have many fewer doubts about CSU’s ability to hold this line than we do about Wyoming’s.
Murray State (12-2, 5-0; NET: 31, SOS: 118): Hell of a year to be affiliated with Murray State. Ja Morant is out here in the NBA doing impossible things and breaking people’s brains on a nightly basis, and meanwhile back in Murray the Racers are setting an early at-large NCAA Tournament type of pace. You love to see it, all of it, though as ever getting an at-large bid out of the Ohio Valley Conference isn’t easy. There are a lot — and we mean a lot — of bad losses to avoid between now and Selection Sunday. But with a road win at Belmont already in the pocket, Murray State’s entire aim now will be about not suffering any letdowns against the Eastern Illinoises of the world. It’s harder than it looks.
Davidson (13-2, 4-0; NET: 36, SOS: 196): Davidson not being able to play its scheduled game against Loyola Chicago stings; that would have been a quality piece of a schedule that could definitely use one more solid-to-excellent opponent on it, whatever the result. Fortunately for the Wildcats, it picked up Dec. 21’s neutral site game against Alabama, which was really an Alabama home game in Birmingham, but which ended up being Davidson’s marquee victory of the season. It was also one of the more assured, professional performances we’ve seen all season. The Wildcats are highly competent, particularly on the offensive end, and former Michigan State guard Foster Loyer has found new hoops life as Bob McKillop’s extremely efficient point guard. It’s fun to see. Massive game Tuesday night — a Quadrant 1 road trip to VCU, perhaps the last Q1 chance Davidson will get all year.
San Francisco (14-3, 2-1; NET: 37, SOS: 150): Gonzaga can feel sure about its tournament bid for many reasons, but a better West Coast Conference is chief among them. San Francisco’s men’s hoops program has been on the rise for half of a decade now, since Kyle Smith got it respectable and turned it over to Todd Golden, who has generally kept the same pace of year-over-year improvement. This year, that means adding a fourth viable at-large contender to the WCC ranks. Saturday’s 71-69 home loss to BYU was a minor heartbreaker, but as long as USF avoids anything crazy at Portland and Pepperdine this week, it gets a crack at Saint Mary’s on Jan. 27.
Saint Mary’s (12-4, 1-1; NET: 38, SOS: 72): Randy Bennett’s teams have traditionally played flowing, hot-shooting offense, but last year’s team was rough in this regard, and this year’s group is only slightly improved. The offense abandoned SMC entirely at BYU on Jan. 8, for example, when the Gaels scored all of 43 points in 64 trips. Very un-Saint Mary’s-esque. The good news is this team defends like crazy, and quality defense (fueled by elite perimeter shot suppression) has thus far been enough to keep this team above water in all of the games it should win. Oregon’s recent road wins at UCLA and USC will be a welcome sight; if Oregon gets good, one of this team’s more notable nonconference wins will drastically increase its value.
Belmont (12-4, 4-1; NET: 40, SOS: 86): Chattanooga may have lost its spot on this page with a loss to Western Carolina the other day, but the Mocs remain a top-45 team in the NET all the same, and thus a quality win for Belmont. The same goes for Saint Louis; the Billikens aren’t here, but they’re not far off, and Belmont beat them on the road. Before the season started, if you’d said “Belmont will be good,” we’d totally believe you. If you’d said “Belmont’s at-large case will be presaged on victories over Chattanooga, Saint Louis and Iona,” we’d have wondered what you were smoking and whether you could hook us up. But that’s where Belmont is right now, staring down a OVC field full of potential bad losses and a potentially all-important trip to Murray State at the end of the season. Going to be an interesting one.
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UAB (13-4, 5-1; NET: 42, SOS: 244): Very fringe situation here. The NET is eye-catching, yes, but that schedule is a yikes, and the quality wins are at Saint Louis (same as Belmont, actually) and at North Texas, with an 0-2 record against Quadrant 2 opposition and a road loss at 157th-ranked Rice. Andy Kennedy actually got Bob Huggins to come to Birmingham for a true road game and lost by six. Maybe UAB figures out a way to stay on the bubble long-term, but the C-USA automatic bid already sort of feels like the play here. We’ll see.
San Diego State (10-3, 2-0; NET: 45, SOS: 83): It would have been nice of Georgetown to not be awful. Presumably, when the Aztecs saw the Hoyas on the long-term event schedule, they assumed they were getting a reasonably quality opponent in a high-major league. Instead, they got the 211th-ranked team in the NET. That’s Quadrant 4 — even on a neutral court. Insane! Their home game against Arizona State, which they barely survived, is not dissimilar. Both games probably “should” have led to this being an even better schedule than what it currently looks like, but at least SDSU has played five Quadrant 1 opponents after just two league games played, including a home win over Colorado State, and at least it plays in a league where Colorado State, Boise State, Utah State, Fresno State, and so on will present robust opportunities on a fairly regular basis.
Boise State (11-4, 3-0; NET: 47, SOS: 218): The whole “well, at least the Mountain West has some good teams in it” thing especially applies to the Broncos, who are still waiting on their first Q1 opposition of the season. That’s right: Not Quadrant 1 win. Their first Quadrant 1 game of any kind at all. They’ll get that chance a handful of times between now and the end of the season, and possibly four times in a row between Jan. 20 and Jan. 28, when they play at Utah State, at San Diego State, vs. Wyoming and at Fresno State in the matter of nine days. To call that a season-making stretch is to put it extremely lightly.
Iona (14-3, 6-0; NET: 52, SOS: 156): Rick Pitino: good basketball coach. We know, we know, hot take, but the Watch has long maintained that there are very few dudes who have ever been as purely good at coaching basketball players to effectively play the game of basketball as one Richard Andrew Pitino. All of the other stuff, the self-destructive streak, that’s a different discussion. The guy can coach, and voila: After leading Iona to the Big Dance in his first season in charge — the team had barely played together and practically walked through the league tournament — Pitino now has the Gaels in a real hunt for an at-large bid, having beaten Alabama on a neutral floor and made it deep into January with exactly zero losses to teams ranked outside Quadrant 1. Whether Iona can survive 14 more games against the rest of the MAAC without taking a few bad losses along the way remains to be seen. But Iona as at-large hopeful is a very real thing. Pitino, man. The guy is just a freak.
VCU (10-5, 3-1; NET: 69, SOS: 75): VCU currently finds itself relatively far out on the bubble fringe, with no Q1 wins to speak of, a 2-4 combined record against the top two quadrants, and a 14-point home loss to Wagner that may or may not age super well. But Tuesday’s home date with Davidson is a key chance, and it is followed by yet another game at Davidson on Jan. 26. We’ll have a pretty good idea of how this thing is going to go by then.
St. Bonaventure (10-3, 2-0; NET: 92, SOS: 117): The Bonnies entered the season as the nation’s mid-major darlings, a small-town team with a locked-in starting five that has grown together, emerged as a borderline dominant force in the A-10 last year, and appeared poised to go on to even bigger and better things in 2021-22. It hasn’t totally played out that way. Bona hasn’t been bad — it has beaten Marquette and Boise on neutral courts, and has one non-Q1 loss (home to Northern Iowa) on its resume, which happens sometimes — but it hasn’t performed to the level most expected at the start of the year. This NET is a little harsh for a three-loss team, but the combination of awful performances in defeat (particularly against Virginia Tech, an 86-49 drubbing) and close wins against bad teams (80-76 over La Salle, for example) have made this metric look vastly worse than the team actually is. Still: It presents St. Bonaventure with even more work to do than the sheer wins and losses on their resume already require.
(Top photo of Kansas’ Ochai Agbaji: Jay Biggerstaff / USA Today)