In 2010, I started writing Bubble Watch. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. My editor then assigned it to me, explained the concept, said he thought I would do a nice job with it. He also warned me: It was a lot. The first one, when so many teams were in play, would take more time than I thought. There would be some late nights along the way. It was part of the deal.

I didn’t care. I was 25. At the time, I lived with college buddies in Chicago. I threw myself into it. I gradually realized it was a great excuse to write about every team that mattered, that the yes-or-no of whether a team would make the tournament was, at least until early March, only a fraction of its purpose. It wasn’t important. But it also kind of was.

A few years later, my wife and I started dating. I moved to D.C. We got married. We moved apartments. ESPN laid off hundreds of writers two weeks before our first child was born. My first child was born. My contract ran out. I started at The Athletic. Two years later, a couple months before the pandemic, our second arrived. We moved again. Our third. The Athletic laid people off. I started a newsletter.

We have done so many other things — those billions of milliseconds of life that you take for granted in the moment and then well up over when your iPhone serves you a cheesy photo curation years afterward — that have nothing to do with college basketball or media or TV rights or any of the stuff I wanted to be angry about Tuesday night, when it became clear the NCAA was going to expand its men’s and women’s tournaments to 76 teams after all. We have lived life.

All along, Bubble Watch has been a part of it. All along, Bubble Watch has been more or less the same. Now it will change, because the tournament is changing. This is not important. But it also kind of is.

The news from ESPN’s Pete Thamel was, frankly, anticlimactic. Of course, you know? It’s been talked about for years — more than a decade, really, in various forms — and we all assumed it was going to happen at some point, and now it’s here.

The expansion, which has been discussed for well over a year, is on track to be formalized in the upcoming weeks and would begin this coming season. Sources indicated mid-May as a potential timeline for an announcement.

Though there are still steps to take in terms of approvals via various NCAA committees, a source indicated “those are just formalities.”

“They have what they need to move forward,” a source said.

Heated reactions have ensued. Most people don’t seem to like it. You have to hand it to Matt Norlander — and I mean this sincerely — because he is perhaps the most visible critic of tournament expansion while also working for the same corporation that, as he and Thamel reported, has been discussing this move with the NCAA for weeks. He went off in the CBS podcast with Gary Parrish Tuesday night, and then clearly had a strong editorial hand on a piece reacting to the news, with this subhed: “The NCAA Tournament is set to soon get an official major makeover, despite being a widely unpopular idea, sources told CBS Sports.”

I used to be 100 percent of the way there with Matt, as strident as any critic of the idea. In many ways, I still am.

Here’s why: It is clear this change is happening for purely monetary reasons. There is no legitimate competitive or entertainment-related justification for the change. It is happening so the NCAA can make a little more money on its sole cash cow now, and also much more money later, while also (at least temporarily) defanging the ever-looming breakaway threat from the Big Ten, SEC, and whatever Brett Yormark dreams up in the rare moments when he’s not obsessing over, like, business card stock.

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The people who don’t stand to make a buck off tournament expansion almost universally don’t want it to happen. There are very few strong arguments for it. That is a powerful argument against it.

There are a few good-faith cases in the other direction. Ken Pomeroy was the first guest on my podcast last summer, around the time this topic was popping up; he was and presumably remains a proponent. It’s fair. He makes fine points. I respectfully disagree, but at least he has consistently articulated a position beyond “don’t worry, it’s fine, you’ll still like it anyway.”

But Ken and a few selected others aside, there have been very few good, reasoned, proactive arguments for expansion. I know; I’ve looked. I’ve tried to talk myself into it. I’ve really tried. (One other notable exception: Alan Bykowski of Cracked Sidewalks, whose enthusiastic expansion proposal I covered last year.)

Even the NCAA itself hasn’t really made a pitch. Charlie Baker is a former politician well aware of the need to create popular consensus for policy proposals — and he has overseen a rapid increase in the sheer speed of NCAA rulemaking processes, for which he deserves credit — and yet in the past two years he has said far less about this generational change to his organization’s marquee event than he has about the NCAA’s new eligibility plan in the past two months.

No one in power has attempted to argue this would be a better product. It is far more likely to be worse. The question is not whether, but how much. Hell, for sheer bracket legibility purposes — the thing that drives so much interest in the tournament in the days after Selection Sunday for casual fans especially — the First Four (er, “opening round”) is already a slightly awkward fit. Now it’s a total mess. Can you even fit the thing onto one 8 x 11? Where do all these extra games go? How much do they matter? How much will people care? Does anyone — other than a handful of conference commissioners — actually think this will be an improvement over what we currently have?

How much can you change a thing without fundamentally degrading it? How much mild long-term annoyance will your customers accept? Where is the balance between immediate financial gain (and, in this case, forced self-preservation) and organic health?

(It is also, not for nothing, frustrating timing: College basketball is in its best shape in decades, and very few coherently run organizations would be looking to make huge, potentially alienating changes right now. College sports are not coherently run, of course.)

Then, of course, there are the teams. This is the world we will now live in:

This is what a 76-team field’s bubble would have looked like in 2026. What do you see? Mediocre high-major teams. Expanding the tournament by eight teams might occasionally benefit the odd mid-major Indiana State, but more likely than not it is going to benefit teams like the ones you see above. As Will Warren noted Tuesday night:

Last three years combined using Bart’s 76-team model (which he would admit is makeshift but is likely pretty close to the truth): a combined 5 mid-majors added to the field with 24 additional spots. It’s not gonna help Tulsa and Belmont. It’s gonna help 19-13 Virginia Tech.

That’s the first point to hammer home: This is not a change being made to help plucky little guys get in the field. The tournament will be agnostically larger, but the same at-large trends we’ve seen in recent years will continue. The only differeAn nce is bubble teams will be (even) worse.

And, let’s be real, that last part is what I really care about. While the rest of the world frets about what this will do to the bracket, the strange and slightly damaged part of me that has been doing this ridiculous column for a decade and a half is more preoccupied with the process of figuring that bracket out in the first place.

Seriously: What the hell does Bubble Watch look like now? In a 76-team field, how far down this list do you go before you cut things off?

Wake Forest? Colorado! Arizona State?! The same Arizona State whose coach knew he was getting fired and giving existential press conferences in mid-January? That’s a Bubble Watch team now?

This is obviously ridiculous. It’s also — I’ll admit it — a tiny bit exciting. The idea of Bubble Watch is already inherently goofy, something you should take only so seriously. But the possibilities for chaos just burst wide open. It’s like the classic Darren Rovell tweet: I feel bad for the tournament. But this is tremendous content.

Or is it? I don’t know. We’ll find out together.

What I do know is that despite all of the things I’ve written about tournament expansion in the past, and all of the very obvious reasons it seems like a bad idea, and how grating the prevailing counterarguments have usually been — it won’t be terrible, and you’ll still like it because it’s still the tournament so just suck it up and stop freaking out — I wasn’t as angry as I thought I would be Tuesday night. I wanted to be angry. I felt like I should be angry. But I wasn’t, not really.

Maybe it was the inevitability; this was hardly a surprise. Maybe the long lead time removed the sting.

Or maybe it was just the passage of time. You get older. The world changes. Your life changes. Your plans change. Eventually you get used to it all — with the feeling of “thrownness,” as Heidegger called it, which is pretty much just how it feels to be alive right now — and eventually the things that once really animated you slide further back in the queue.

You engage strategically. You protect yourself. You ration feeling. You pick your spots. You spend your energy on what you can control and let the things you can’t — at least some of them, sometimes — wash over.

The NCAA Tournament is not going to get better. It will probably get worse. It will still be one of our favorite things in the world. It is annoying that these sentences are all true at once. This is not a cathartic reaction. It would be more satisfying to say the whole thing was ruined forever. It would feel better to be angrier.

But, strangely enough, we’re not. It’s just another change. 76 teams. Sigh. Fine. Bubble Watch — this consistent thing in my life for 16 years, this thing we do together here in our little corner of the Internet, this that is important, but also kind of not — will change along with it. Sure. Whatever. That’s life. Let’s go.

And just like that, the 2026 transfer portal is closed. Flew by, didn’t it? Fifteen days is not very many days. They nonetheless contained multitudes: a couple thousand players entered, hundreds of rosters were overhauled, and the trajectories of dozens programs were altered for better and worse. The sheer pace of activity was both thrilling and bewildering, albeit less so the latter than ever before.

There are, obviously, more developments to come. Lots of players who went in the portal are still not committed to schools. The No. 1 player in the class of 2026 is still weighing his options. The draft decision deadline is weeks away. A surprise NBA coaching change could reopen a great team’s roster. The potential for fifth-year players to receive a late-breaking NCAA waiver — predicated on a potential age-based eligibility policy change already being discussed in committee — could make the summer weird. Plenty of major programs have key rotation holes to fill.

But the first great wave of 2026 roster movement has given us more than enough to chew on now. Here’s a first, incomplete list of everything that has stuck out so far — with plenty more still to come.

Florida is the clear national title favorite — and another great sign for college basketball

On Tuesday’s podcast, which Tate and I recorded Monday evening, we were floating around some of our portal thoughts when I realized I wasn’t sure what was going on with Thomas Haugh and Florida overall (or if, as was guaranteed to happen, there was any news that we’d missed while recording). Until we mentioned it, I had taken it as read that Haugh would at least go test the draft, and that Florida’s roster would be in a bit of flux until then. Haugh hadn’t officially announced his decision to come back to Gainesville; that came 12 hours later. But Tate said the rumblings were already out there, and a realization dawned in real time on the show: Holy hell, Florida was going to be scary.

It was a startling realization. This idea hadn’t occurred before. The thought of Haugh turning down a clear first-round NBA path — after at least looking in to the possibility of a pro turn the previous summer — seemed farfetched. The idea of Florida returning that entire frontcourt again seemed crazy.

But here we are, and so forget everything we always say now about doing “way too early” projections in the portal era. I’ve seen enough: Florida is the obvious 2027 national title favorite.

Boogie Fland is back. Florida seems convinced prodigal son Denzel Aberdeen will get a waiver, but even if he doesn’t Urban Klavzar (who was often in Florida’s best lineups last season) can jump in. And then they’re running back the Haugh-Alex Condon-Ruben Chinyelu front three, which Golden has already proven — after some fall 2025 stylistic awkwardness — can work. With respect to Xaivian Lee, this Florida squad is arguably better than last season’s, and that team spent huge stretches of the SEC campaign dominating everyone in their path.

This is crazy. It’s also awesome for college basketball.

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A big part of the lament has always been that the portal and NIL makes teams impossible to hold together, that the incentives to start a new bidding war every spring are simply too strong — even for the best or most loyal players at top programs — to ignore. This is not at all what has happened with Florida (or with several other top teams this spring, which will be discussed throughout below). Indeed, it’s the opposite.

This is a clear upside of big money: Thomas Haugh, a potential but uncertain lottery pick, is arguably better off staying at UF for another season, where he will make yet more guaranteed life-changing cash without the downside risk of embarking on a professional career. Guys with far worse NBA chances than Haugh used to jump at the draft all the time. Suddenly, staying is the smart move.

Florida undoubtedly leveraged Haugh’s lifelong Gators fandom — his desire to be a legend like his own childhood heroes — in their pitch, too. But the point is that wasn’t their only pitch. The other part was money, now and beyond, and lots of it. That piece allowed Haugh to do what he really wanted to do all along anyway, without asking him to make massive and frankly stupid financial sacrifice. It allowed him to make a crucial life decision based on sentimentality. It made all else equal.

And so Florida will retain the core of one of the great teams of the past five years — the exact kind of classical, dominant, yeah-let’s-all-run-it-back-together groups the NIL era had supposedly killed off for good. This is the 2006-07 Florida Gators. This is Tyler Hansbrough, Ty Lawson, Wayne Ellington and Danny Green giving it one more go. This is an elite program convincing its best players to consider legacy and their time together. The only difference is that those decisions are made alongside money, rather than in opposition to it, and that money can be used for retention just as readily — and probably more efficiently — as an annual roster rebuild.

The more college basketball changes, the more it stays the same.

(Speaking of which: If Michigan, which has already retained Elliot Cadeau and Trey McKenney, gets similar draft decisions to Haugh’s from Morez Johnson and Aday Mara, then that whole sweeping take about Florida being the obvious favorite will get watered down a lot. This is Michigan we’re talking about. Johnson seems more likely than Mara to return, for what it’s worth, but we’ll see. There is also Duke. Duke is really good. There is also the Todd Golden question. But as it stands, Florida is No. 1.)

Kentucky keeps being a mess

If there was a defining characteristic to Kentucky’s disappointing 2025-26 season, beyond the misjudged and ill-fitting roster itself, it was the emotional intensity of it all. An early season loss to Louisville was bad enough on its own; Mark Pope’s strange wink-wink half-disclosure about a pregame locker room problem made it needlessly worse. Kentucky couldn’t just get rocked by a good Michigan State team at the Champions Classic; Pope had to make sure fans knew he viewed it is an existential crisis just as much as they did. Spending $22 million on a redundant roster that didn’t look like anything Pope had ever coached before was the original sin, sure. But the sense of chaos was especially damaging. The way the program, and specifically the head coach, handled early disappointments made fans feel like the grown ups maybe weren’t actually in charge after all. It was too messy.

It’s still super messy.

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Whether you immediately loathed the idea of men’s college basketball players transferring freely for money, or whether you were always enthusiastic about the concept — and there were dozens of us! — there was one thing pretty much every college basketball fan could always agree on:

It was, and remains, totally bewildering.

For decades, rosters were built in fundamentally the same way. Rare changes were always mild: gradually fewer destination restrictions, arcane graduate-transfer eligibility allowances, more players willing to just sit out a year anyway, a handful of bluebloods hoarding one-and-done lottery picks. The overall direction of travel was always the same. Coaches would spend years obsessing over thousands of high school prospects. They’d sign two or three or four of those prospects. (Occasionally, if not often, with the involvement of a paper bag.) Then they’d lay out their development programs, plan for multi-year scholarship timelines, and assume this ancient incentive structure — if you leave, you have to sit, tsk-tsk — would discourage defections.

Now all that is gone. In the past five years there have been, at last unofficial count, five gazillion words lamenting The Way Things Are Now. Yet despite all the wailing, we maybe still haven’t totally reckoned with just how epochal this revolution has been. Everything is different now. Everything keeps getting more different. Anyone who grew up watching a fundamentally different thing — even those who thought changes were necessary and good — has undergone a totally exhausting, brain-melting degree of cultural change. It’s been insane.

Which is maybe why I have, the past couple springs, found myself mostly uninterested in the day-to-day mechanics of the portal. I guess I was overwhelmed.

With thousands of players moving in all directions — and with so many of them entering during the NCAA Tournament, when all I want to do is think about the freaking NCAA Tournament, thanks — there were too many 300-word newsers, too many overhyped posts about 17.3 points-per-game-averaging MAAC guards, too much “has narrowed his final list to,” too unwieldy a volume of campus visits, too inexhaustible a glut of “with that being said.” It was like trying to catch dust.

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I love this game. I think the product on the floor is better and more entertaining than ever. I think the portal is both a moral and competitive good. But the process itself has never been actively enjoyable. It was a firehose of information overload, and every individual piece of information was half-formed, isolated, context-free. In the moment, what sense could you make of any of it? It’s not like you could start analyzing teams. You could barely analyze team needs. You had no idea how much money programs had to spend, or which coaches were actually offering which players what, or how many shoes were left to drop or when. Better, then, to check out, circle back in mid-summer, let the dust settle.

All of which I’d been thinking about last week, as I left Indianapolis and joined my family on spring break, and in the days since. At some point along the way, as I found myself unwittingly eager to follow each bit of transfer news, and then happily dig in to the player afterward, it dawned on me:

This doesn’t feel so weird now. I feel like I know what’s going on. Also: I’m enjoying this? I’m enjoying this. This is getting fun.

Why? Why now? There are a few things going on here (above and beyond all of the positives I’ve been going on about since 2021).

1. It opened after the tournament ended

Just an obvious, perfect change. Clear delineation. Needs no further explanation. It’s so much better.

2. The information environment is now keeping up

This is the biggest improvement by far. In the early days, there were very few centralized places to find comprehensive transfer portal information. You absorbed it mostly ephemerally. VerbalCommits was the only big fat list of every player in the portal, with their previous team and the destination (if applicable) and it was — respectfully, pre-redesign — not exactly the pinnacle of data readability. (You just had to Ctrl-F your way around. It wasn’t the end of the world.) Editorially driven rankings, with blurbs and the whole nine, were usually simple and counting stats-obsessed.

Look at us now. Beyond the reporters doing the usual (great) newsbreaking work, Trilly chief among them, there are incredible options for deeper context and analysis. Bart Torvik maintains not one but two massive databases of transfer players — one for players who have committed and one for guys still in the portal — ranked according to his own advanced stats. You can subscribe to Jim Root’s regularly updated Google Sheet as he tracks and fills out every roster in the country. You can read extremely detailed tactics- and fit-oriented deep dives on every significant transfer, as they happen, from our buddies at Basket Under Review. The Athletic guys are doing high-level player rankings, tinged with Sam Vecenie’s scouting perspective. There’s a ton more besides.

And then there’s Evan Miyakawa. Evan’s own portal rankings — based on his BPR metric, which includes a defensive performance component most models don’t account for — are about as useful as you’ll find. But Evan’s work behind the scenes really fascinates me. Last summer, Evan launched the Front Office Suite, a tool programs can use to input NIL values they’re hearing in the market, even ephemerally. The estimates go in, they bump into Evan’s metrics, and coaches can get a sense of not only what players are good but where value can be had.

As Evan laid out Tuesday, this data is already allowing him to form meaningful about the 2026 portal, namely that — as expected — big guys are getting wildly overpaid:

By looking at players across positions who are expected to have similar value next year according to our player projections, we can compare their actual going rates to determine market demand. … Centers are being the most overpaid, costing about 30% more than they should on average, while point guards are more of a bargain. … [To] obtain a center or a point guard who are equivalent in talent level, it would cost $1.3 million for the center, while only $813,000 for the point guard. That means, in this market, it costs 61% more NIL dollars to get a center of the same caliber as a point guard.

Evan’s data also showed that the total pool of money in the market is still growing rapidly:

There are about 30 teams that use the Front Office Suite, spanning 12 conferences in the high-major and mid-major ranks. By summarizing the NIL player data entered across all teams and comparing it to last year’s market data, we can gain a pretty good understanding of how the NIL market has changed over the past year.

As mentioned at the top, the NIL market for Division 1 players is up about 65% from last year. That means that a player good enough to be valued at $1 million last offseason would be getting around $1.65 million this offseason. It’s pretty hard to fathom how market rates have increased this much, especially since we saw a similar increase from 2024 to 2025, if not even higher.

The market is up even higher for players coming from high-major programs: There has been a 73% increase in the going rate for players on power conference teams. The market increase for players from low- and mid-major conferences is slightly lower, up 44% from last offseason.

Reminder: We’re one week in to the 2026 portal. This is incredibly useful information! (Evan is a very smart dude.) It is bound to inform a ton of the analysis that happens in the next weeks and months, and may already be impacting the way coaches are considering roster builds. (Maybe go back four-out? Mid-2010s smallball?!)

But the most exciting thing about Evan’s info is that it feels like the first fleeting glimpse of a new world altogether. Maybe eventually we'll actually know what guys are getting paid and what teams have to spend. So much of the confusion and messiness of this time of year — the complete opacity of offers, counteroffers, agent talk and budgets — could one day become fully transparent. The possibilities for value-based analysis beyond player role and team fit would explode.

That journey has just begun. But we’re already light years from where we started.

3. Programs (and players) keep getting smarter

To wit: P.J. Haggerty.

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Dan Hurley made no secret of his distaste for the way UConn was discussed before its national semifinal win over Illinois Saturday — intentionally interjecting the take after an unrelated question, just to make sure he got it out there.

“You’re coming into the game as an underdog versus a team that you beat by 13 points earlier in the season, which was kind of surprising, that that’s how we kind of came into the game,” Hurley said after the Huskies’ 71-62 win. “Obviously I’ve been waiting to say that and now I forgot your question.”

It was, in retrospect, a bit silly to think of UConn as the plucky outsider. This is a program with two titles and three Final Four (and now national title game) appearances in the past four seasons. This is a coach with an unthinkably brilliant record in the last two weekends of the NCAA Tournament. This is a sustained, historic run of success much else in modern college hoops history. Doubting UConn is dumb.

Which is why it was so funny to hear Hurley talk about Monday’s game against Michigan, in which he thanked the basketball gods his Huskies only need to beat these guys once:

“Really, you don’t have to be the best team,” Hurley said Sunday. “You don’t have to have the best season to win this tournament. These are all one game, Game 7, single elimination. There’s been plenty of times in the history of this tournament where the best team hasn’t won it. You’ve just got to be better for one night. … The good thing for us, it’s not a seven-game series. Just got to play one game on Monday night.”

What a difference 12 hours, and two Big Ten opponents, makes. Sunday’s presser at Lucas Oil Stadium was notably low on the kind of swaggering cash talk you occasionally get from “the best coach in the f***ing sport.” There was no winking, actually-I-think-we’re-better stuff. Later, Hurley told The Field of 68’s Jeff Goodman he was “checking to see if there’s a judge who will let my ‘24 team come back to Indy and help out.” He didn’t even push back on Jeff’s David vs. Goliath joke! This is freaking UConn we’re talking about. The undisputed reigning king of the sport, leading a blueblood with an unmatched history of modern postseason success, sounded like a mid-major guy stoking blind faith, in contrast to all available evidence, that his team really could shock the world.

This is what Michigan has done to this Final Four.

Frankly, we should have known. It was right there all along. Even if you thought Arizona’s interior-obsessed offense would struggle against its worst possible matchup in Michigan (and we did) it felt crazy to expect the extent of the whooping Dusty May’s team delivered. And yet Saturday night, and basically the entire UM run, has felt like a reminder of a truth we all first discovered in November:

Sometimes, first impressions are right. The best team is just the best team. Conference play, with all of its rigor and all of its quality opposition, can almost become distracting. Tommy Lloyd had an interesting thought about this after Arizona’s blowout loss Saturday: Even if you’re really, really good (and Arizona was), Michigan is the kind of historically dominant squad that takes time to get used to, and if you don’t have that they can kill you before the game even really starts:

“I think they’re one of those teams -- I would say, like, Houston’s like that, or even Iowa State’s like that, teams we played, you have to play them a few times,” Lloyd said. “After you kind of get used to playing them a few times you get more comfortable. I think that’s probably why you saw more closer games in the Big Ten for them towards the end — because teams probably got comfortable playing them and had a better plan.”

This seems right. Coaches’ deep understanding of their own closed competitive ecosystems — how players on X team match up with your own, and thus opponent Y, etc. — undoubtedly help too, even if you haven’t played Michigan twice. Purdue’s Big Ten title win was the most notable example: A Matt Painter tactical masterclass built on the Boilermakers’ own unique strengths (using Braden Smith’s dribble sense and Trey Kaufman-Renn’s 15-foot push shots to pull Michigan’s bigs out from under the rim), deployed against a team it had faced just three weeks’ prior.

This is not a luxury most tourney teams have. At every stop, Michigan’s opponents have looked exactly the same as the teams Michigan hammered once it figured things out in late November: overwhelmed, shellshocked, finished in a flash.

The formula remains the same. It is uniquely designed for postseason surety.

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INDIANAPOLIS — The Final Four is always great, obviously, because it’s the Final Four. It can’t not be fun. But all Final Fours are not created equal.

We can’t help but think about 2011, about how far we’ve come. Remember 2011? A post-Gordon Hayward Butler and that First Four VCU — two teams that won a combined nine NCAA Tournament games and still finished 36th and 53rd in adjusted efficiency in KenPom’s final rankings — played in one national semifinal. Kemba Walker-era UConn, which ended the regular season 21-9 and 4-7 in their last 11, beat a grinding Kentucky 56-55 on the other side. Then came the title game: 53-41 UConn. Fifty-seven possessions. Dross.

Back then, being a year-round college basketball fan took work. The default posture was defensive. The criticisms of the product were loud and obvious and frankly correct — the game was too physical, too defensive, too short on talent, and simply not that much fun to sit down and watch — and we true believers, surrounded on all sides by people puncturing our little bubble, could look silly trying to defend it. But there was no defending that title game.

Most of all, there was no defending the college basketball season that preceded it. There was no defending the prevailing culture in the sport, the years of decline and decay, that produced it. However defensive one was inclined to be — the tournament is always great, the sport will be fine just like it always is, and anyway this is our thing, leave us alone, don’t watch if you don’t like it, hmph — there was no denying that debacle at NRG. At minimum, it forced a top-down strategic reckoning. Eighteen months later, the freedom of movement era began.

That was 15 years ago. Look at us now.

This Final Four feels like the end result of everything that has changed for the better about the sport since. With respect to Kemba, the four squads in Indy this week would have blown any of those 2011 teams out of the damn gym. They would also have been incomprehensible, practically alien — simultaneously huge and fast and hyperefficient and smart. The complexity and stylistic diversity of these four teams’ tactics would have given most 2011 coaches a seizure. Wait: Your playmaking guards are Keaton Wagler and David Mirkovic? You have Yaxel Lendeborg, Aday Mara, and Morez Johnson, and you prefer to get out and run? You bring Tobe Awaka off the bench?! You run these sets, like, every possession? What the hell is all this?!

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Among casual fans, the tournament is most renowned for its wackiness. Survivorship bias distorts conclusions. Some Final Fours are just, you know, the four teams that won. But more often than not, the final weekend of the season says something meaningful about the sport that yielded it.

This is a fantastic, fascinating edition, populated by historically excellent teams who are also super fun to watch. It’s no accident. This is what college basketball is now.

In case you can’t tell, we can’t wait for Saturday night. Can’t wait to watch it play out. Can’t wait to bask in it at all at Lucas Oil Stadium. Can’t wait to have that moment where we snap out of it and realize it’s time to decide what we’re going to say and write. Just can’t stop thinking about it. So, as is tradition, here are a few of the things we’ve been thinking about:

No. 3 Illinois vs. No. 2 UConn (Saturday, 6:09 pm ET)

1. Can Illinois stop Tarris Reed?

On the podcast two weeks ago, we half-joked with Tate about Tarris Reed’s historic first NCAA Tournament weekend, when Reed became the first player since Tim Duncan in 1997 to have at least 40 points and 40 rebounds in the first two rounds. The joke, of course, was that Reed had 31 points and 27 rebounds in the first round against Furman (which, to be clear, is still insane), and then had a very pedestrian performance in the second. The Duncan comparison sounded better than it felt.

Nobody’s joking about it now. Reed is having one of the historically great tournaments of any big in living memory. He had 20-5-4 against the bulwark frontcourt of Michigan State. He had 26 points, nine rebounds, four blocks, three assists and two steals against Duke and, as the rest of the Huskies flailed from the perimeter, was the only reason the Blue Devils weren’t up by a totally unrecoverable margin at halftime.

He will have to be every bit as good Saturday night.

Tactically speaking, Illinois is not a team that wants to double the post, particularly if the other team (like, say, Indiana, which Illinois throttled with this strategy Feb. 15) is doing a lot of complex off-ball screening and movement. The Illini have plenty of size and rim protection down there, after all, and they’d rather let their perimeter defenders stay extended. Maybe Brad Underwood will cook up different looks for this game — his subtle gravitational adjustments against Houston doomed the Cougars — but everything we’ve seen from this Illini team suggests it will prioritize the outside-in threat rather than the other way around.

This makes Reed the most important player in the game. The rest of the analytical breakdown favors the Illini: This is the best offense in the country, led by a freshman lottery pick that basically none of UConn’s guards or wings can individually match up with, playing for a coaching staff that has long since decided letting Wagler but also Mirkovic and Andrej Stojakovic hunt matchups is the most straightforward path to success. Illinois used to be a more systematic offensive team; it was at its best in a collective flow state. That was the kind of team you could see Ben McCollum drawing in to his Iowa quicksand. That’s not this Illinois. This one can play a bunch of different ways — it plays notably faster with Stojakovic flying at the rim than when Mirkovic is playing booty-ball from 18 feet — but the end result is almost always a good shot. Good luck with this:

UConn is more unlikely than any of Illinois’ three Final Four opponents to have the answers for those one-on-one matchups. Illinois is going to score, and it is going to run like hell, and use all of its positional length, trying to keep the Huskies from generating good looks off of all those pretty offensive sets.

Reed is the answer. Reed’s ability to generate a steady churn of points against the tall but not exactly physically stout Ivisicii — to establish a baseline, to hang around, to put the opponents in foul trouble, to start gnawing away at the load-bearing pillars, to put Underwood’s beautiful machine under stress — is the single biggest prospective advantage UConn has.

2. Does Danny Hurley have one more in him?

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Straight in to part two. See here for part one:

East Region

No. 5 St. Johns vs. No. 1 Duke (Friday, 7:10 pm ET)
No. 3 Michigan State vs. No. 2 UConn (Friday, 9:45 pm ET)

9. Can St. John’s offense be more than transition and Zuby?

On the one hand, yes: Bryce Hopkins just made six 3s against Kansas. Asked and answered! On the other hand: come on. Hopkins had made 25 3s all season before last Sunday. This is not something anyone should expect to happen again.

This remains the big question for the Johnnies, and the reason why (despite thought No. 10 just below this) we expect Duke to win the game. St. John’s is one of the best transition teams in college basketball. Or, at the very least, one of the most transition-dependent teams in college basketball. When they are running — playing off their aggressive defense, flying at you with all that length and interior finishing skill — they can be super-efficient. But as we saw against Kansas, Hopkins or not, when they have to run half-court stuff, they can get totally bogged down.

The bad news: Duke is really good at playing transition defense.

Whatever modern hybrid space-y stuff Jon Scheyer has adopted (and adapted) on offense, this Blue Devils team practically plays a Bo Ryan style when it comes to sprinting back on defense. (It used to be teams like Ryan’s and Tony Bennett’s would intentionally eschew offensive rebounds to get back into their half-court defensive shell, but Duke is incredible at doing both. No. 1 overall seed for a reason.) Duke ranks 343rd in the country in defensive possession length, per KenPom. They really don’t let you get up and down. And so when they don’t — and presumably, unless something goes totally haywire against St. John’s, they won’t — the Johnnies are going to have to figure out how to get into some sort of offense in the half court.

Zuby Ejiofor will be fine. He might even knock down a couple of 3s of his own, as the Blue Devils attempt to force him away from the rim. But Dillon Mitchell and Hopkins and Ian Jackson and Oziyah Sellers — all of these guys have to find more flow than what they conjured up against a Kansas team with less athleticism, length, and switchability than Duke. They have to figure out a way to be a surprise.

10. Is this Cam Boozer’s nightmare matchup?

Whatever ugliness you can see in your mind’s eye for the St. John’s offense, it’s not like these guys can’t guard on the other end. They’re pretty great at that. And indeed: They might be the ideal team to play against the most productive player in all of college basketball. They fit him perfectly.

Boozer is often a brute interior battering ram, and does most of his best work over his left shoulder, but most of all he’s a matchup problem. He can handle the ball and make elite reads. He can draw switches and punish them. He can step out and hit 3s. Guarding him well requires a very specific type of player — not a center, not a 3, not even a typical power forward, but a guy with similar size and mobility who is comfortable playing in all of the same zones. Like, say, Virginia’s Thijs De Ridder, who played a big part in Boozer’s worst game of the 2025-26 season (a high bar, but still) in the ACC tournament title game. De Ridder is a 6-foot-9 forward-wing with strength and foot speed; he looked like a plausible, visible counter to Boozer even back on Feb. 28, when the Cavaliers got blown out in Cameron.

St. John’s has like three of these guys.

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The first week of the 2026 NCAA Tournament did lots of things at once.

It ended the two most compelling and omnipresent stories of the season: Kentucky’s overemotional mediocrity and Kansas’s Darryn Peterson-dominated roller coaster. It marked, maybe — based on the way he’s been talking, and the way people who hear things have been talking, and we can’t stress this enough: maybe — the final games of Bill Self’s Hall of Fame career. It sealed Hubert Davis’s tenuous North Carolina fate, and thus created a wide open, epochal, first-time-outside-the-family UNC coaching search.

It revealed Ben McCollum’s unique genius to the world. It yielded one of the most unlikely power-conference Sweet Sixteen matchups ever (Iowa-Nebraska). It gave the Big Ten incredible odds of winning its first national title in 26 years. It put the Midwest at the forefront of the sport. It ensured tickets in DC this weekend will cost a fortune. (The Acela will be lit.) It featured the closest, greatest missed buzzer beater in 16 years. It raised questions about why all of the balls are so inflated. It unleashed a horrifying abomination on a bewildered public.

Mostly it produced big, thematic takes. It drove some folks a little crazy. Cinderella is dead! (Probably not.) Upsets will never happen again! (Immediately wrong.) NIL and the portal and conference realignment are evil! (Wrong, wrong, last one’s true.) The system is unfair! (Always has been.) Mid-majors can’t get games! (It depends.) Or actually maybe they can, sort of, like Matt Painter said! (It depends.) Are metrics making the committee too good at seeding the field?! (Ha.) Are smarter tactics making the best teams too good at basketball??? (Never.)

Why isn’t this tournament the exact idealized version of itself I remember from when I was 12? (You’re not 12.)

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It’s like this every year, to some extent, particularly among those who don’t watch or talk about college basketball before March 1 and then pile in with half-formed big-picture opinions that feel important but also reveal an utter lack of interest in the actual games themselves. (These are the same people who will ask the same state-of-the-world questions to every coach at Thursday’s Final Four press conferences. Groan.) Still, last weekend felt newly jarring. The complaints were louder than ever. The level of play was higher than ever. The underlying structures were more nuanced than ever. And more people than ever before watched:

Look: These discussions are variably valid. Some are pretty dumb. Some are worth having. Crucially, though: in the offseason. That’s the beauty of caring about this sport all year: You can spend all of the time there is no basketball talking about of the stuff that isn’t basketball. We’ll do it in two weeks. We’ll do it all summer! But when there is basketball — when it’s the NCAA Tournament, when the best teams are this good, when things have been this much fun to watch — the rest of this stuff feels beside the point.

Below, then, is a list of variously sized thoughts about the actual games happening this week, broken down by region, informed by everything that came before. Truly: couldn’t be more excited.

West Region

No. 11 Texas vs. No. 2 Purdue (Thursday, 7:10 pm ET)
No. 4 Arkansas vs. No. 1 Arizona (Thursday, 9:45 pm ET)

1. Could Texas’s defensive rebirth possibly be real?

In 2015, the Duke Blue Devils ranked seventh in the ACC in points allowed per possession. That team was uber-talented, of course, and could always score it, but things got so bad on that end during league play — particularly in back-to-back double-digit losses to NC State and Miami — that Coach K, for quite possibly the first time in his already long and historic career, made Duke (gasp) play zone.

It was a whole thing. It was the big honking wart all season, especially relative to dominant undefeated Kentucky, even as Duke earned a No. 1 seed. And then Jahlil Okafor and Justise Winslow et al. got into the NCAA Tournament and did this:

The only team break the point-per-trip barrier against the 2015 national champs, or get close, was one of the best offenses of the KenPom era. In the national title game. Which Duke won.

Point being: There is precedent here. Per Bart Torvik, Texas allowed 1.05 ppp and ranked 92nd in the country across the 2025-26 season. In its three NCAA Tournament wins, it has allowed .92 ppp and ranks 12th nationally.

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Hello friends. Yes, it’s time.

The NCAA Tournament, the greatest three weeks of every year, begins tonight. Or, well, sort of. Technically, it begins Thursday. But also kind of tonight. But your bracket doesn’t need to be turned in until Thursday morning. But there is basketball on tonight.

Whatever. Point is, we’re here, it’s all happening, and there a…

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When VCU beat St. Joe’s Saturday, we were overcome by an immediate, almost instinctual, wave of dread.

To be fair, that is often how we feel this time of year. The Saturday of Champ Week is always the last jam-packed Saturday of the pre-Dance season; there is no Saturday with more games from here. As exciting as the tournament is, its arrival begins the countdown: Three more weekends. Three weeks from now, we’ll be at the Final Four, the buzzer will sound, the confetti will drop, another incredible college hoops season will end and the long offseason will begin. It’s always deeply bittersweet.

But the dread was also VCU-specific. VCU will play Dayton in the A10 title game today. Dayton is not a bubble team. VCU very much is. The Rams have performed well against their schedule and built viable metrics across the board, but they have always lacked quality wins — South Florida, at Dayton, and Virginia Tech are their top three, with a 6-7 record against the top two quadrants — and thus remain close to the cut line, right in the mix with the Texases, Auburns, Oklahomas and San Diego States of the world.

Here’s the big problem: This game tips at 1 p.m. ET on Selection Sunday. The committee, as ever, will be under severe time pressure all afternoon; there’s a deadline for the bracket that they simply can not miss. Every year, a result happens on Sunday — an SEC team wins the title game that its coach (usually John Calipari) thinks should result in a higher seed, or whatever — that doesn’t ultimately show up in the bracket a couple hours later. The bracket has already been built. The work is already done. The Sunday games, and to a lesser extent the entire weekend, tend to matter way less than people think.

So: What if Dayton wins tomorrow? Will the committee scrub every seed and run VCU down the pole? In theory, yes. Would it be much more seamless to put the Rams to the side, insert auto-bid Dayton into whatever spot the bubble team occupied, and keep it pushing? Also yes. VCU is not such an obvious selection, relative to other bubble teams, that the decision wouldn’t be fairly easy to justify.

This calculus extends to the rest of the field. Besides whatever mediocre SEC team (and/or San Diego State) the committee ultimately tacks on to the bottom of the bracket, this is the only intrigue left: Is Dayton a bid thief? Would VCU be in anyway? Which other bubble team would lose out?

Or, as we suspect, will the A10 be a two-bid league one way or the other — with Sunday’s title game functioning as a play-in?

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That’s the last possible drama left on this bubble, at least as far as we can see. The committee will do what it will do. It will deliberate and decide to take one of Texas or Auburn or Oklahoma or San Diego State (all discussed in detail below). None of the teams left out will have a strong argument after the fact. There will be no angry columns to write about a deserving team that got snubbed. The rest of the world will move on and fill out their brackets, more unconcerned than ever about who limped their way into the First Four.

This bubble, in particular, has felt less dynamic than many in recent seasons: There are teams that should get at-large bids, and there are a handful — and it’s really just like three or four — that no one will be willing to go to bat for, whether they sneak in or not, whatever narrow distinctions the committee decides to draw. The entire situation feels pretty staid.

Among teams still on the page, we’d rank it like so:

Miami University
Texas A&M
Santa Clara
NC State
UCF
Missouri
SMU
VCU
Oklahoma (last team in)
CUT LINE
Texas (first team out)
Auburn
San Diego State
New Mexico
Indiana
Seton Hall
Stanford

Assuming SMU’s BJ Edwards is healthy (also more on which below), there’s a pretty clear this team deserves to be in dropoff after SMU. We won’t be able to muster an ounce of outrage for OU, UT, Auburn or beyond — or even, if things get weird, Missouri, which should get in but shot itself in the foot with its nonconference schedule long ago.

But VCU is up in the air. They’re the last meaningful, anxious question about this bracket before then Bubble Watch ends and the countdown begins.

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Automatic bids from non-Bubble Watch leagues: 22
Locks: 34
Should be in: 5
Work to do: 1
Waiting game: 10

Housekeeping and miscellany:

• This is the final Bubble Watch update of 2025-26. Good news: We’ll be putting updates in the live chat throughout Sunday, including during the selection show, so come on by.

• More good news: As ever, we’ll be devoting the same energy toward the NCAA Tournament to come. This newsletter an independent, ad-free labor of love. If you would like to support its continued existence, as well as our upcoming tournament coverage — including on-site coverage of the East regional and our 17th Final Four — please consider a paid subscription today.

• Or! If you enjoy this, and feel like more people need to read it, send it to a friend, family member, co-worker, whatever. When new subscribers sign up, they still often say they didn’t realize we were publishing independently, or where. Help us spread the word, and thank you so much for your support.

• Some email providers impose limits on email length. If your email cuts off, be sure to click through to the site itself to read it all.

• There are almost certainly typos in the below copy. We are our only editor; this is a one-man show. If you spot factual mistakes, get in touch in the comments or shoot me a note.

• NET and WAB are current as of the previous day. Records are always up to date. Thanks as ever to Warren Nolan for his immensely helpful site.

ACC

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When TNT analyst Bruce Pearl — recently retired Auburn head men’s basketball coach, father of current Auburn head men’s basketball coach Steven Pearl, and University of Auburn ambassador — first questioned Miami University’s at-large credentials, he created an obvious dichotomy. It was clear to any viewer that Pearl, in talking about Miami, was really talking his own book.

Casting doubt on the Redhawks’ at-large chances meant a spot might open up for Auburn. Duh. Because everyone could see this motivation clearly, the arguments since have often focused disproportionately on an imaginary contest between those two schools alone.

What record would Miami have with Auburn’s schedule? Would this Auburn team be 31-1 if the roles were reversed? The pairing was extreme: One team had an incredible record and no big wins against a bad schedule. The other had a terrible record and a win over Florida against a great schedule.

Then Miami kept winning. The Redhawks finished 31-1, and in doing so more or less guaranteed their at-large spot, Thursday’s hilariously deranged takes notwithstanding.

Auburn, though? Auburn stayed on the bubble. Auburn is no longer in competition with Miami. Indeed, as the cut line firms up one day before the selection show, it has become clear who the true enemies of Auburn men’s basketball and the success of the Pearl dynasty really are:

The University of Texas. (Also maybe Oklahoma.)

BracketMatrix’s composite field had Texas as the last team all day on Friday. It had Auburn as the first team out. There seems to be a fair amount of consensus, if not outright groupthink, on this: Auburn was selected in just 20 of the 121 brackets submitted to the matrix. But should there be? Here’s UT’s team sheet:

And here’s Auburn’s:

Again, we’re talking about the difference between the last team in and the first team out, so distinctions are hard to draw. But are we sure — however marginally — that Texas has the better case? Both teams have 17 wins. Auburn has slightly better metrics. It played a vastly better schedule. It also went out of its way to play a great nonconference schedule, too (while Texas’s ranks 228th) … there’s a case you can make.

Of course, you could also say that one of these two teams has lost 16 games, which is disqualifying then and there, and we wouldn’t argue. Frankly, on this bubble, and with these two teams, we have a hard time forming a strong opinion either way. Both teams are blah. It’s almost a matter of personal taste. Flip a coin, if you’d rather.

The point is broader: After weeks of mid-major vs. power conference selection discourse, after all that Miami back and forth, this is who Auburn is in actual bubble competition with: another mediocre 17-win team from their own league. It’s more accurate, but less dramatic.

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Automatic bids from non-Bubble Watch leagues: 22
Locks: 35
Should be in: 5
Work to do: 2
Waiting game: 9

Housekeeping and miscellany:

• Some email providers impose limits on email length. If your email cuts off, be sure to click through to the site itself to read it all.

• There are almost certainly typos in the below copy. We are our only editor; this is a one-man show. If you spot factual mistakes or just think we should consider a team not on the page, get in touch in the comments or shoot me a note.

• NET and WAB are always current as of the previous day. Records are always up to date. Thanks as ever to Warren Nolan for his immensely helpful site.

• We wrote all of this, by hand, as nature intended. It’s a labor of love. If you would like to support its existence (and be able to comment, and join the live chats, and — at the founding tier — do a regular Zoom call with us to talk hoops) please consider a paid subscription today.

• Or! If you enjoy this, and feel like more people need to read it, or you want someone to join us for live chats throughout the NCAA Tournament, or whatever: send it to a friend, family member, co-worker, whatever. When new subscribers sign up, they still often say they just didn’t realize we were on Substack now. Help us spread the word! Thanks!

ACC

We have taken Virginia Tech off the page. Why? Because Virginia Tech took itself off the page:

This is wild, right? On the one hand, we maybe sort of get it: Guys don’t want to play in the NIT, a number of them are going to leave for the pros or transfer, coaches are being hired earlier and earlier in the calendar, you want to get a head start on whatever the next roster looks like, etc. Fine. On the other, much more important hand: Selection Sunday hasn’t happened yet! It’s tomorrow! Virginia Tech was still on the page! Nothing is official. We didn’t think the Hokies would get in, obviously, and we didn’t think they’d end up particularly close. But what sort of number would you put on Virginia Tech being a random, out of nowhere selection surprise. Five percent? Ten? You don’t want to see how it plays out? If you had a five percent chance to win a poker hand, and you don’t have to bet again to see the river, would you just get up and walk away from the table?

We’re not sure we’ve ever seen a bubble team, even a real long shot, formally end its own postseason before it knew the committee’s decision. Hokies, guys: What are we doing?

Lock: Duke, Virginia, Louisville, North Carolina, Miami, Clemson
Should be in: NC State
Waiting game: SMU, Stanford

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Corey Alexander said something incredible Thursday night. During the first half of Florida State’s quarterfinal matchup with Duke, Dave O’Brien asked Alexander, partner on the call, to offer his take on the bubble discourse of the day. Miami lost, Auburn lost. Corey, what do you make of it all?

Alexander hemmed and hawed, acted like he couldn’t say whatever forbidden thing he really wanted to say, then ripped off this corker:

“If you took (the three ACC coaches who had been fired already) — Damon Stoudamire, Adrian Autry, Earl Grant — with those rosters, and they played Miami of Ohio’s schedule, they’d go 31-1 too.”

Whooaaaaa! Corey! Fire up the “First Take” audition reel! Bringing the heat! Who knew?! Honestly — we were kind of impressed.

Then, of course, we were dumbfounded. Does Corey Alexander even realize who he’s talking about here? These are the three teams you want to use in your comparison? Georgia Tech lost 20 games, including to DePaul, Drake, and Mississippi State. Syracuse lost 17 times, including to Hofstra, Pitt, and Boston College. Boston College lost to everybody, as Boston College does, including: FAU, Central Connecticut (KenPom rank: 306), Tulane (203), Georgia Tech and, get this, UMass — the same team that beat Miami Thursday afternoon. These were his comparisons. These were the teams he said would go 31-1.

If this was just Alexander jawboning on behalf of some fired ACC pals, you could laugh it off and move on. But Alexander was hardly alone. We saw an incredible number of people saying directionally similar (albeit less insane) things about Miami after their loss, and not just random Auburn fans making their case on the Internet, either. There was this …

… and also this, a column written by USA Today’s senior national college football (ahem) writer, published before Miami even lost, in which the author opened a couple of KenPom tabs, saw some numbers, realized Miami’s unbeaten season had come against an objectively bad schedule, reverted to football pundit brain (but who did they beat?!) and thus concluded that the literal coolest thing ever actually sucked.

For anyone who actually, you know, follows college basketball, this experience is disorienting.

We’ve been watching Miami for months. Buzzer readers have been along for every update (and live-chatting every narrow ESPN+ escape). We’ve covered all this ground! We’ve warned about the Redhawks’ awful schedule and nonexistent margin for error; explained why their schedule was bad (because scheduling for mid-majors is super hard); insisted they would have to enter Selection Sunday with no more than two losses to even have a chance; dissected the gulf between their predictive metrics and their wins above bubble rank; explained what WAB is, why old-school fans should like it (winning tons of games is hard!) and why it has become so important to the committee; and anticipated the upside-down discourse to come.

That was written Feb. 6. It’s March 12. It’s too late, guys. You missed out. This conversation could have happened in earnest a few weeks ago, if the Redhawks had dropped a random league game. But they didn’t, so it didn’t. Teams with unbeaten regular seasons do not miss the NCAA Tournament. Teams with one loss on Selection Sunday do not miss the NCAA Tournament. That’s it. That’s all you need to know. Miami did what it needed to do.

We don’t expect everyone to be sickos about this stuff. But a bit of Googling never hurt.

Anyway, the selection committee could always light a 40-year precedent on fire. Anything is possible, technically. Miami really is a unique case. Someone in the room will at least make the argument. They’ll try it on, if only for the purposes of the exercise.

We can imagine it now: “OK, folks, thought experiment: If Boston College played this schedule, could they go 31-1 too?” And then everyone would laugh and laugh and laugh. Boston College. Hahahahaha. Ten out of 10.

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Automatic bids from non-Bubble Watch leagues: 22
Locks: 34
Should be in: 6
Work to do: 5
Waiting game: 7

Housekeeping and miscellany:

• Some email providers impose limits on email length. If your email cuts off, be sure to click through to the site itself to read it all.

• There are almost certainly typos in the below copy. We are our only editor; this is a one-man show. If you spot factual mistakes or just think we should consider a team not on the page, get in touch in the comments or shoot me a note.

• NET and WAB are always current as of the previous day. Records are always up to date. Thanks as ever to Warren Nolan for his immensely helpful site.

• We wrote all of this, by hand, as nature intended. It’s a labor of love. If you would like to support its existence (and be able to comment, and join the live chats, and — at the founding tier — do a regular Zoom call with us to talk hoops) please consider a paid subscription today.

• Or! If you enjoy this, and feel like more people need to read it, or you want someone to join us for live chats throughout the NCAA Tournament, or whatever: send it to a friend, family member, co-worker, whatever. When new subscribers sign up, they still often say they just didn’t realize we were on Substack now. Help us spread the word! Thanks!

ACC

Wednesday morning’s Florida State excitement nearly paid off. The way-better-than-you-think Seminoles had a shot at the buzzer to knock off Duke — with whom they played an even 40 minutes from start to finish, a refreshing departure from the Blue Devils’ typical demolitions — that hit back rim and bounced off. We would have loved to see what that neutral-court win might have done for FSU’s NET, WAB, et al, and how long we would have spent agonizing whether to throw them on the page for a laugh. Alas.

And, with that, the ACC bubble was done. None of the teams listed below play again this week — which is not to say their situations won’t change.

Lock: Duke, Louisville, Virginia, North Carolina, Miami, Clemson
Should be in: NC State
Waiting game: SMU, Virginia Tech, Stanford

NC State (20-13, 10-8; NET: 35, WAB: 43): NC State finished their ACC tournament as a microcosm of their broader 2025-26 campaign: not bad, but not as good as you’d hope. The 81-74 loss was certainly a better accounting of themselves than they gave in Charlottesville (90-61) Feb. 24. But it wasn’t the resounding postseason push Will Wade might have been hoping for — assuming Wade, who has long seemed resigned to the flaws of this group, was still capable of hope on the subject anyway. For his part, he directly quashed rumors that he was considering re-taking the LSU job this spring, and talked about how excited he was to build something better in Raleigh moving forward. For now, he’ll have to settle for a double-digit seed seed after year one.

SMU (20-12, 8-10; NET: 37, WAB: 45): SMU’s WAB fell to 45th after its Wednesday loss to Louisville, which is, funny enough, exactly where the metric’s threshold for the “average” bubble team cuts off. This all feels very Andy Enfield, whose teams — at least every team that didn’t have Evan Mobley on it — have lived in an uncannily tight band of averageness for the majority of his post Dunk City career:

To be fair, this one often looked better than most. The Mustangs spent most of the season ranked in the low 30s at KenPom. Their late-season losing streak, and metrics drift, came after guard B.J. Edwards injured his knee. Edwards was day to day before the ACC tournament, and one assumes SMU is currently making it clear to the committee that he’s on the cusp of a return any day now, honestly, really, he’s practicing already, so maybe just ignore all those losses in late February? Please? We usually downplay these kinds of injury what-ifs, but a team this wedded to the bubble needs every margin it can get. Edwards is important enough for it to matter.

Virginia Tech (19-13, 8-10; NET: 56, WAB: 50): We’ve kept Virginia Tech on the page the last couple of days more as a courtesy than anything else. It’s not going to happen — especially after Miami’s loss created a MAC bid thief and slid everyone down a spot.

Stanford (20-12, 9-9; NET: 62, WAB: 56): If you cover Quad 3 with a dark piece of construction paper, Stanford looks like a no-brainer tournament team. 5-6 in Quad 1, 4-2 in Quad 2, wins over Louisville, UNC, Saint Louis, Virginia Tech (away), SMU — put them in the field! Unfortunately, the other four losses exist: Notre Dame, Pitt, UNLV, Seattle. The first three came back in December, and were part of the reason we didn’t revisit this team much in the Watch until it won at NC State March 7. They might be in a next four out here and there, but we’re not sure how they find a way into the field.

Big 12

What a day for the Big 12’s gimmick LED basketball court Thursday. Gratifying and validating.

It really sucked to look at. Worse than that, though, is that it looked unhealthy for players. Kansas State’s Khamari McGriff said the lights gave him a migraine, which is why he spent the second half against BYU on the bench with a towel on his head. All day, as players slipped and slid, players and coaches told reporters the court was slippery. Then, Texas Tech star Christian Anderson slipped and injured himself against Iowa State, forcing him to leave the game, and really, who could have possibly foreseen this? Who could have imagined putting elite athletes on a big slab of glass might be an issue?

(Anderson seemed fine postgame, as he encouraged the Big 12 to return to a normal basketball court, but really: imagine if he wasn’t. Imagine if that kid missed the NCAA Tournament because of a jangling-keys attention-span stunt. Also: Imagine how Darryn Peterson’s agent feels watching him play two whole halves of basketball on this thing! There is no clinical antiperspirant strong enough.)

After Anderson’s injury, Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark hopped on the ESPN broadcast. He said safety was the top priority. He reminded the hosts that the court was FIBA-certified and already being used in EuroLeague play. He played a bit of defense.

But Yormark ultimately stuck to his guns: “Anytime you innovate, you never get 100% buy-in,” he said.

Move fast and break tendons. Real man in the arena stuff.

Then, early Friday morning, came the best part, just a few minutes after Kansas and TCU finished:

One day we’ll tell our grandchildren about that brief and glorious time when the best and brightest in this country — college athletics conference commissioners — were allowed to create, originate, and be free from the parasite facing nature through an intermediary.

March 10, 2026 — March 12, 2026. Time to pick up the pieces.

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Cincinnati gave up an eight point lead with two minutes to play, and lost in overtime. Indiana lost by 13 to Northwestern. Texas fell by 10 to Ole Miss. Cal, in so far as they were still on the far fringe of bubble at all, lost to Florida State.

And so the great bubble bloodbath of 2026 rolled on.

Not every high-major hopeful had a disastrous Tuesday. Oklahoma stayed hot. UCF, Cincinnati’s torturers, bolstered their spot. Auburn avoided disaster against Mississippi State. Still, the general trajectory felt like a continuation of last Saturday’s mess, creating what feels like an even wider gap between teams on the Nos. 9 and 10 lines coming in to Champ Week and the teams on the actual bubble several notches below.

No big introductory theme for you this morning; there are lots of games starting in a couple of hours, so let’s just jump right in. As of writing, here’s how we tally the bubble math:

Automatic bids from non-Bubble Watch leagues: 22
Locks: 33
Should be in: 9
Work to do: 6
Waiting game: 5

That’s a lot of locks. But it feels right.

Housekeeping and miscellany:

• Some email providers impose limits on email length. If your email cuts off, be sure to click through to the site itself to read it all.

• There are almost certainly typos in the below copy. We are our only editor; this is a one-man show. If you spot factual mistakes or just think we should consider a team not on the page, get in touch in the comments or shoot me a note.

• NET and WAB are always current as of the previous day. Records are always up to date. Thanks as ever to Warren Nolan for his immensely helpful site.

• We wrote all of this, by hand, as nature intended. It’s a labor of love. If you would like to support its existence (and be able to comment, and join the live chats, and — at the founding tier — do a regular Zoom call with us to talk hoops) please consider a paid subscription today. Thanks!

ACC

As we sat down to write this (too) late Wednesday night, we found ourselves briefly, irrationally excited about Florida State. Maybe, with the disaster unfolding everywhere else, a long-shot hope could rise at the last possible moment — especially a team with a 10-3 record in its last 13 games, one rated 29th in Bart Torvik’s efficiency rankings since Jan. 18. Come on: Why not Florida State?!

Oh. Right. That’s why.

Still: Kudos to the ‘Noles. The Luke Loucks hire raised at least a few eyebrows in the spring, and the 7-11 start didn’t inspire much faith. But they’ve figured some stuff out (a willingness to sell out on volume 3-point shooting, regardless of accuracy, chief among it) and been a top-half ACC team for months. (The staff also elaborately celebrates accurate iPad reads after successful coach’s challenges, which is very high-level stuff.) By the way: The last time they played Duke, on Jan. 3, was a four-point home loss, by the way. The Blue Devils are banged up this week. Crazier things have happened.

Lock: Duke, Louisville, Virginia, North Carolina, Miami, Clemson
Should be in: NC State
Waiting game: SMU, Virginia Tech, Stanford

NC State (20-12, 10-8; NET: 35, WAB: 43): Will Wade’s 2026 habit of sarcastically insulting his own team extended into the postseason after Wednesday’s 98-88 win over Pitt, when a reporter began a question by noting that it was the first time the Panthers had hit 12 3s in a game all season. “Well, they hadn’t seen our defense,” Wade quipped. Wade was mostly amiable and praised his team from there, mentioning in mitigation that Pitt hit some tough looks along the way, but you could tell he remains existentially frustrated that his first Wolfpack team was in Wednesday’s quietly desperate position in the first place. NC State really needed to win this game! It mattered way more than anyone would have assumed five weeks — let alone five months — ago.

SMU (20-13, 8-10; NET: 37, WAB: 46): SMU’s 62-58, 61-possession loss to Louisville Wednesday was a 180 from the Mustangs’ win over the Cardinals Feb. 17. That game was a blast, even if it was a bit defense-optional, all pace and playmaking guards, and we’re still not totally sure how both teams got dragged so deep into the muck in Charlotte. In any case, the Mustangs have nothing to do now but wait. They will have been encouraged by the losses elsewhere on the bubble throughout the evening, and their WAB and predictive metrics compare favorably to many of the teams still on this page. But they are just 9-13 against the top two quadrants, and their best win (the aforementioned Louisville game) feels a bit perceptually inflated by Louisville’s NET. (The Cards haven’t exactly racked up a murderer’s row of victories in their own right.) Our guess is they’ll sneak in, especially if the committee takes B.J. Edwards’ late-season absence into account. We’d certainly rather have Boopie in the tournament than not. But there’s a lot of ball between now and Selection Sunday.

Virginia Tech (19-13, 8-10; NET 57, WAB: 53): Tuesday’s blurb focused on how bad we felt for Mike “what the f*** am I doing wrong” Young, who only narrowly avoided a full-on breakdown after his team’s heartbreaking loss at Virginia last week. Now we really feel bad. The Hokies needed at least a couple of wins in Charlotte this week. What they got instead was a one-and-done overtime loss to Wake Forest. Much like Stanford below, Tech will be stuck with their long-shot resume, including a 2-10 Quad 1 record — and a WAB that dropped from 46th to 53rd after the Wake loss — as-is for the rest of the week. Just brutal.

Stanford (20-12, 9-9; NET: 62, WAB: 58): On a late-season bubble full of fading hopes, Stanford stood out: The Cardinal entered the postseason having won six of their last eight, including over SMU and NC State. Finally! Someone, somewhere was making a move! Someone was doing, like, literally anything! Hooray! Naturally, on Tuesday, Stanford immediately lost to Pitt. Sigh. In terms of spectacle, it was one of the most depressing conference tourney games in recent history, observed by a friends-and-family-sized crowd that politely murmured along as Stanford’s season ended with a whimper. With one notable exception, of course: The guy singing Goo Goo Dolls during Stanford free throw attempts.

As funny as that was — and it was hilarious — the main reason you can hear him bleating so clearly is because the rest of the gym is dead, dead silent. It’s bleak.

Anyway, we’ve seen a fair number of bracket folks putting Stanford much closer to the field since the last weekend of the regular season. We weren’t as convinced, though it was nice to see someone making a push. But even if you’re higher on them than we’ve been, they now face the prospect of sitting at home all week while the rest of the bubble will be chipping away. Bad spot to be in.

Big 12

We saw some response to Wes Miller’s comments after Wednesday’s crushing overtime loss to UCF chiding him for being desperate, which felt a little harsh. To be clear, he is desperate. Miller has been on the hot seat since the end of last season, with his reputation as a rising star in the profession hanging by a thread; he needs this tournament bid badly, whatever Cincinnati brass decides to do this spring. But you know what? Lots of coaches are desperate! Coaches of teams who have compiled much better NCAA Tournament resumes — teams much closer to the cut line than Cincinnati has been at any point in the past week, coaches with much greater job security — do this stuff all the time. Sometimes their dads even do it for them!

Unfortunately for Wes, “when was the last time a team won X out of its last Y games in Z league?” is not a formal criteria for NCAA Tournament selection. For all of the good stuff Cincinnati did this season, particularly down the stretch — including Feb. 21’s rejuvenating win over Kansas — they needed to back it up with a run in Kansas City. Without it, with the whole resume in relief, the good work in league play feels like too little, too late.

Speaking of which: TCU once appeared to be trending in that same direction. It’s been a journey. TCU lost to New Orleans at home to open the season, then should have beaten Michigan Nov. 14 but didn’t, then did beat Florida and Wisconsin in San Diego, then immediately lost to Notre Dame in Ft. Worth. It was hard to know what to make of all that — especially because that was back when Florida was losing games and figuring things out, which feels like a very long time ago indeed. When the Frogs opened the Big 12 3-6, with losses to Colorado and Utah, we suspected (as in the preseason, when the roster filled us with little hope) they would soon fade against the rigors of the league.

Not so. TCU has lost one game since Feb. 1! Along the way, they’ve knocked off Iowa State, won at Texas Tech, handled surging Cincinnati, and now find themselves 6-6 against Quad 1 and 7-2 against Quad 2 with strong metrics and top-end wins most bubble teams dream of. They’re a lock.

Locks: Arizona, Houston, Iowa State, Texas Tech, Kansas, BYU, TCU
Should be in: UCF

UCF (21-10, 9-9; NET: 51, WAB: 38): First of all: There was a lot of hype about the court at the Big 12 tournament. It’s basically a big LED screen! It can change graphics and colors! We can do anything we want with it! The future is now! Cool. So why did you take the fill tool on Microsoft Paint and make the entire court gray?

What was the thinking here? We’d love a designer — a graphical artist, or someone who plans modern convention center spaces, or even one of the thousands of interior designers our wife follows on Instagram — to explain this choice. Is it supposed to play down the new-age court during live action and intentionally draw the eye to the colors of each team’s uniforms? Did it only feel like watching a basketball game in a Darkest Dungeon level because Cincinnati and UCF were wearing white and black? Did everyone else immediately check their display’s calibration? Or was that just us?

We would have made it look either a) distracting and garish or b) like a totally normal hardwood court. Not that anyone asked.

ANYWAY: Cincinnati’s immense pain was UCF’s gain. The Knights trailed 58-50 with just over two minutes left in regulation, at which point KenPom’s win probability metric gave them a whopping 3.3% chance of winning the contest. Cincinnati may not be heading to the tournament, but beating them on a neutral court counts as a Quad 1 win, which is something. Most of all the comeback halted UCF’s late-season slide toward the in-or-out cut. A loss against Arizona Thursday shouldn’t change that calculus.

Big East

Shout out to the Georgetown fan who brought the laptop along to the Garden Wednesday night:

In the circumstances, we see nothing wrong with this. It’s a weeknight. Some folks work long hours. Maybe he was reading Bubble Watch? Or maybe he was hedging his bets: Georgetown has not been the most captivating product lately, and a Wednesday night No. 11 vs. No. 6 matchup against DePaul had every possibility of becoming unwatchable. Might as well keep that Whiskerwood colony close at hand. Just in case.

Of course, Georgetown did beat DePaul, 63-56, not only advancing the Hoyas to face Villanova Thursday but bringing Ed Cooley to 2-1 against the Blue Demons this season and 4-4 in his three years on the Hilltop. (Georgetown went 0-3 against DePaul last year.) Baby steps.

Locks: Connecticut, St. John’s, Villanova
Work to do: Seton Hall

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What happened to the bubble on the final weekend of the 2025-26 regular season can be summarized in exactly two words:

Everyone lost.

We could end the newsletter right there. The defeats were overwhelming: SMU, Virginia Tech, Cal, Cincinnati, Seton Hall, Indiana, Auburn, Missouri and New Mexico all stepped on rakes. They accounted for a significant percentage of teams listed in the “work to do” category in last Friday’s column. Some wobbly-ish “should be in” teams got in on the fun, too: UCF, NC State, Texas, and even Saint Louis, our beautiful Billiken boys, all lost.

There were a couple of winners in there, too, of course (Miami, VCU, Ohio State by a million). But mostly it was a bloodbath. Discourse rapidly ensued. As Matt Norlander, a staunch critic of NCAA Tournament expansion, noted, it feels awfully hard to justify expanding the field after an “appalling” weekend like that. The response was reasonable: Don’t people say this every year? Yeah, kind of! The bubble basically always feels like it’s a mess, because it is, because that’s what makes it the bubble. How do you know this one is especially bad?

Thankfully, Evan Miyakawa had the numbers handy:

The same gap was evident between Evan’s average top 30 team and the average bubble team. “This year’s bubble is objectively the worst we’ve ever had,” Evan concluded — with the past two seasons not far behind.

(Interestingly, Evan also found the gap between bubble teams and the average Division I team is also wider than ever. That reinforces the notion that the resource at the very top of the sport, spread downward among mediocre power conference teams, is drinking the rest of Division I’s milkshake at roughly the rate we all assumed it would, even if the effects are not traditionally distributed: Nebraska and Vanderbilt are having amazing seasons, after all.)

This largely matches our experience. How did Cal stick around so long? Indiana is soft. SMU can’t guard. Stanford wasn’t on the page last week; a win at NC State immediately puts them back in the mix. Very few of these teams feel like they’re surging down the stretch. None of them feel like they’ve figured something out, or are getting healthy, or might just get hot. Most feel destined for a quiet, painless first round (or First Four) exit. Can you hold still, please, sir? The numbers make sense.

The good news? Much of the fun of Bubble Watch is that this exact nonsense is priced in. It’s the bubble! These teams are, by definition, not that good! They have glaring tactical flaws or played weird schedules or spent the past month shooting themselves in the foot. One of them is 16-15, has won two games since Jan. 28, and the coach’s dad has floated the argument they deserve to get in over a team that is literally undefeated. This what it’s all about, baby! The pure, uncut stuff. This is why we get up in the morning.

All of the team sheet shreding should make for a fascinating Champ Week, too. No, seriously: Stanford is back. We’re monitoring Oklahoma! West Virginia might get involved! Chaos is Bubble Watch’s bread and butter. And this year still holds the potential for some of the most chaotic, glorious, bubbliest screwball comedy the sport can produce. It’s exactly why we’re here.

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Housekeeping and miscellany:

• As is tradition, we’ll be sending out updated Bubble Watch files throughout Champ Week beginning Thursday morning. (We’ll update this page after Tuesday night’s results, but it’s just a couple of games, and we’re not going spam 8,000 people with a couple hundred new words about SMU and Virginia Tech.) We’ll be around in the comments section, but we’d also encourage everyone to pop over to the live chat, which have been a blast all season.

• Some email providers impose limits on email length. This is a long file, so if your email cuts off, be sure to click through to the site itself to read it all.

• There are almost certainly typos in the below copy. We are our only editor; this is a one-man show. If you spot factual mistakes or just think we should consider a team not on the page, get in touch in the comments or shoot me a note.

• NET and WAB are always current as of the previous day. Records are always up to date. Thanks as ever to Warren Nolan for his immensely helpful site.

• We wrote all of this, by hand, as nature intended. It’s a labor of love. If you would like to support its existence (and be able to comment, and join the live chats, and — at the founding tier — do a regular Zoom call with us to talk hoops) please consider a paid subscription today. Thanks!

ACC

One consequence of all those losses: Clemson is now a lock. The Tigers could have earned the distinction much earlier; they started 20-4 before a four-game losing streak that exposed some of the underlying brittleness of their resume. That’s still a thing: 36th in NET, 32nd in WAB, 38th at KenPom, with a weird habit of losing to mediocre opposition at home. But the actual bubble is much worse. Whatever happens in the ACC tournament — and they have a chance against North Carolina a — they’re getting in.

Lock: Duke, Virginia, Louisville, North Carolina, Miami, Clemson
Work to do: NC State, SMU
Waiting game: Virginia Tech, Stanford

Read more

Every game is just one game. No, seriously, this is really important to remember: Every game is just one game.

In March, it can be hard to keep things in perspective. Champ Week is nigh. Mid-major tourneys are producing euphoria and ending seasons on the hour. The casual sports viewership engine has begun growling. All of a sudden, on the bubble, every game feels like it is the biggest game of the season.

It is made to feel this way. No one who wants you watch their broadcasts of Tuesday afternoon conference tournament games will ever tell you any different. Every tipoff lead-in comes with a résumé chyron and a grave declaration of hyped-up stakes. Even against bad opponents, every bubble team is playing to “get the win that punches their ticket,” or whatever. Every game somehow means everything.

This is almost never true. We’ve been watching and discussing this season since Florida-Arizona in early November. Many of the folks watching this weekend and next week and in the rest of March and early April — and some of them calling and producing games, too — will have only a faint clue that game even happened.

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The reality is, getting in to the NCAA Tournament requires a level of cumulative success, a steady accumulation of performances and results, sustained across months. The majority of the bubble-relevant games on Saturday, and throughout the next week, will in the end have only a marginal impact on whether your team will get an at-large invitation to the 2026 NCAA Tournament. They matter, obviously. And the margins are tight. But the stakes will almost always be rhetorically overrated. The reactions will almost always be oversold. Each game is only one more piece of the pie.

Except Indiana at Ohio State.

Ha. Sorry. As much as we enjoy delivering this annual sermon in Memento-tattoo-terminology — every game is just one game, don’t listen to their lies, CONSIDER THE SOURCE — sometimes there are glaring exceptions to the rule. The Hoosiers’ trip to Columbus at 5:30 pm ET Saturday is one of those.

We’ve thrown a lot of shade the Buckeyes’ way this season, snarking about their mediocrity, their lack of quality victories, their habit of alternating wins and losses. But the past week has been a breakthrough. Sunday’s win over Purdue was easily this team’s best of the season, and they didn’t follow it up with something silly against Penn State. (They won by 32, in fact.) The metrics look better. The rest of the cut line doesn’t have an obviously better case. The fade we always expected hasn’t materialized. Whether you have OSU in your field right now or not, they have a better argument than at any point this season — and a chance to bolster it Saturday.

Indiana, meanwhile, beat the hell out of Minnesota Wednesday, which probably felt like a relief for IU fans in the moment but is almost more frustrating the more you think about it: This team sure can run up blowouts against bad teams with the best of them. Aside from its own Purdue home win, though, it has constantly fallen short in the games that matter, and slid from a projected No. 8 or No. 9 seed a few weeks ago to one of the last in-or-out teams in most projected fields.

A side-by-side comparison of the two team sheets is funny. Ohio State now also has a home win over Purdue, also has a 2-10 Q1 record, boasts a better Q2 record (6-1 vs. IU’s 3-2), a (slightly) better schedule, and broadly better metrics. Indiana’s second Quad 1 win came at UCLA, while OSU’s came at Northwestern. Otherwise the differences are almost nonexistent. Indiana has more to gain from a true road win Saturday, would nonetheless face the prospect of extinction with a loss, and yet OSU somehow has more to lose.

It is the rarest of bubble artifacts: A game on the final weekend of the season that could, genuinely, decide which of the two gets in the NCAA Tournament. You should ignore this kind of hype — or at least do your best to keep the rest of the season in mind — from now until Selection Sunday. Except tomorrow at 5:30 ET. That one’s for real.

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Housekeeping and miscellany:

• Some email providers impose limits on email length. This is a long file, so if your email cuts off, be sure to click through to the site itself to read it all.

• There are almost certainly typos in the below copy. We are our only editor; this is a one-man show. If you spot factual mistakes or just think we should consider a team not on the page, get in touch in the comments or shoot me a note.

• NET and WAB are always current as of the previous day. Records are always up to date. Thanks as ever to Warren Nolan for his immensely helpful site.

• We wrote all of this, by hand, as nature intended. If you would like to support these efforts (and be able to comment, and join the live chats, and — at the founding tier — do a regular Zoom call with us to talk hoops) please consider a paid subscription today. Thanks!

• As is tradition, we’ll be doing Bubble Watch as a daily file throughout Champ Week next week, until we collapse in a heap approximately 30 minutes after the selection show. We promise to overhype every single blurb to really play on your emotions and manipulate you into subscribing forever. OK, not really. But it will be a lot of fun!

ACC

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We knew these arguments would happen. We always assumed the most interesting bubble team of 2026 — Miami University (Ohio), obviously — would be subject to this exact discourse eventually. We just thought they’d have to lose first.

That was the funniest and most jarring thing about the storm former Auburn coach Bruce Pearl stirred up Saturday. We had to double-check Miami’s record. Did we miss something? Did they lose a game we thought they won? They’re still undefeated, right? Pearl’s comments were incredible that way — they appeared to come from an alternate factual universe:

“Miami (Ohio), here’s the deal. Are we selecting the 68 most deserving teams? Or are we going to select the 68 best teams? If we’re selecting the 68 best teams, then Miami (Ohio) is going to have to win their tournament to qualify as a champion. Because as an at-large, they are not one of the best teams in the country. And that’s going to be a difficult choice for the committee to make.”

Um, no, sorry. That’s not the deal? Again, crucial reminder: Miami (Ohio) still has not lost a game. They’re 29-0. Friday night’s win over Western Michigan was dicey, sure: Travis Steele got a technical foul and knocked over a courtside DJ’s speaker before the Redhawks hit a buzzer-beater to escape Kalamazoo with their 29th win of the season. But escape they did.

You can understand why Steele looks so stressed: He knows better than anyone what’s at stake any time the Redhawks take the floor. One little loss, and everyone will freak out. The “but look at their schedule, are they really that good, are we sure we don’t want a middling bubble team with a 2-8 Quad 1 record to get in the field instead?!” takes will go into overdrive.

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But Pearl got a head start on the nonsense. Crucially, he is not an uninterested observer. Besides being a TV analyst for TNT, Pearl is still a paid ambassador for Auburn athletics. His son is also the current coach. Pearl engineered that succession in the fall, when he abruptly left the program and forced Auburn to hire assistant Steven Pearl, who was unlikely to have received the job if Auburn had done a typical springtime coaching search. The younger Pearl started the season 14-7 and well on track for an at-large bid, but his team has lost seven of the past eight; they’re now 15-14 and very much at risk of missing the field if current form holds. Beyond wanting his own son to do well for straightforward parenting reasons, Bruce Pearl also kind of needs him to do well, lest his entire forced nepotism gameplan goes haywire.

In other words, no, Pearl was not making an argument in good faith. But he doubled down again Monday, telling Barstool he wasn’t “so sure” Miami wouldn’t finish “last in the Big East.” This would be an unpopular opinion for any broadcaster to have. People like successful mid-major teams this time of year; fans tend to want to support them. Coming from Pearl, with his obviously conflicted motivations, it was enraging. There is no constituency for this opinion.

It’s also just silly on the merits! Miami’s case is not complicated. The Redhawks would be in the field if the bracket was made today. They would almost certainly be in the field if they enter Selection Sunday with one loss. Yes, their schedule is bad, they’re in the 80s in most of the predictive metrics, and no one would argue they’re some dominant force on a par with Fred Van Vleet-era Wichita State. But they are undefeated. There is no precedent for leaving out an unbeaten team like this.

Moreover, Miami’s wins above bubble metric — the NCAA’s cherished measure of how a team’s results stack up against the average bubble squad — ranks 32nd. They have outperformed the average bubble team even against their own schedule. If Auburn is the prototypical bubble team, they probably wouldn’t also be 29-0 against Miami’s schedule, is the point. That alone is enough to usher them into the bracket, wherever they end up being seeded.

This is not a real conversation right now. Really can’t stress that enough. It might be Tuesday night, if Miami slips up against Toledo. It might be Friday, if the season closer at Ohio breaks bad. But it’s not a thing today. Results matter. Winning games matters. There is no world in which Auburn — or Indiana, or Cal, or USC, or whatever other mediocre high-major you want — is either more deserving or “better” than a team with 29 wins and zero losses.

Everybody stop it. (Especially Bruce Pearl.)

Housekeeping and miscellany:

• Want to hear more about Bruce Pearl and Miami? Check out this week’s podcast! There’s that, a big section on yet another crop of super-dominant teams making statement wins down the stretch, and a fond farewell to Chad Baker-Mazara, among much more. Like, subscribe, leave a review, and so on:

• Some email providers impose limits on email length. This is a long file, so if your email cuts off, be sure to click through to the site itself to read it all.

• There are almost certainly typos in the below copy. We are our only editor; this is a one-man show. If you spot factual mistakes or just think we should consider a team not on the page, get in touch in the comments or shoot me a note.

• NET and WAB are always current as of the previous day. Records are always up to date. Thanks as ever to Warren Nolan for his immensely helpful site.

• We wrote all of this, by hand, as nature intended. If you would like to support these efforts (and be able to comment, and join the live chats, and — at the founding tier — do a regular Zoom call with us to talk hoops) please consider a paid subscription today. Thanks!

ACC

We have to say: We’re a bit heartened to see Steve Forbes is not immediately on the hot seat:

That’s Trilly Donovan’s latest hot seat tier list. Wake Forest is in the “next year” tier. This feels like a quiet but crucial shift, a nod to a more sophisticated college athletics landscape. For years, people (us included) have written that every season is a crucial one for Forbes at Wake, that this really has to be the time he makes the tournament or else. In a different era, there was a strict years-to-tournament-appearances counter in situations like this; eventually, you would just run out of time. But things are different now. Not all jobs are created equal. Resources vary widely. By all accounts, Wake Forest doesn’t have the same money as many other high-major programs, ACC or otherwise. It’s a hard place to win. Forbes has consistently put good teams on the floor, has the respect of plenty of athletic directors, and would likely get another job immediately if Wake Forest let him go, and most of all it feels like people recognize all of this in a way they simply wouldn’t have been willing to, say, 10 years ago.

It’s not that every coach deserves unlimited patience now; quite the opposite. Some coaching changes should arguably happen faster than ever before. (Georgetown fans don’t need to be patient right now at all.) But it does feel like athletic directors as a whole are getting more clued in about diverging baseline expectations, the challenges of different jobs, and what good coaching performance looks like holistically — beyond the simple yes-or-no of tournament appearances. Wherever Wake fans stand on Forbes, it does feel like the whole sport is getting smarter.

Lock: Duke, Virginia, Louisville, North Carolina
Should be in: NC State, Miami, Clemson
Work to do: SMU, Virginia Tech, California

NC State (19-11, 10-7, NET: 29, WAB: 40): Will Wade’s postgame comments have been high comedy for the past few weeks, but Duke seemed to break him: He left Monday night’s presser without once ripping into his team or calling them soft. Fair enough, honestly: What’s the point? Duke is so much better than everyone that Wade didn’t expect to get anything out of a home game; he was so desperate he threw in a one-day-old junk defense NC State hasn’t used all season. It didn’t help. The good news is the Wolf Pack, as ugly as some of their losses have been, and as rough as the 1-5 record in their last six has felt, didn’t need a result against the dominant Blue Devils to remain in the projected field.

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Longtime Bubble Watch readers know we get excited about many aspects of this insane column we write, but one more so than others: The late, unlikely, unforeseen, team is dead, wait a second, hold on, this might actually be a thing, OK now it’s definitely a thing February bubble charge.

It’s the best. It’s what we live for. Is this a weird thing to live for? Yes. Is this hyperbole? Sure. Do we care about our wife and children more than a team ranked 60th in the NET suddenly getting good at basketball? Of course! (Hi, babe.) But you get the idea. This is the best! Shake things up! Change the status quo! Inject some chaos! Get weird!

Has courage deserted the noble teams of Bubble Watch?! Are there no true late-season spoilers among you?!

Finally, someone has accepted the challenge.

And yes, by gawd, that’s Wes Miller’s music. What a run! We left the Bearcats for dead back in January — really, back in the nonconference, when they lost to Xavier, Eastern Michigan, and also every half-decent team they played — when it became clear this team’s offense had somehow become even more of a mess.

To be fair, Miller has long since seemed to agree: No coach has given more apologetic, shellshocked postgame press conferences this season. When Miller hasn’t looked like a hostage held against his will with a cinder-block backdrop, he’s proactively apologized to Cincinnati fans for not being good enough; he’s been a dead man walking. After Feb. 5’s home loss to West Virginia, his team was 11-12. He might have been preemptively fired then and there. The bubble was a distant, laughable dream.

Since then? This team has exploded offensively and won four straight — including Saturday’s mind-melting 84-68 blowout at Kansas, the out-of-nowhere result of the year.

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Fun fact: The Bearcats have scored 336 points in their last 272 trips — which, again, includes a game at Kansas, which just held Houston to 56 points in 65 trips two nights later. Since Feb. 6, per Bart Torvik, Miller’s team ranks 16th in offensive efficiency and sixth overall, one spot below Arizona, one spot above Illinois. Since Jan. 1, as of writing, they’ve been the 23rd most efficient team in the country. This has been a productive squad for longer than we’ve noticed, for obvious reasons: Results matter, and Cincinnati hasn’t had enough of them, even as their underlying performances have improved.

But in the past two weeks, the results have come. We were as caught off guard by the visit to Allen Fieldhouse as anyone — though maybe not quite as much as Dick Vitale, who tweeted that KU and Darryn Peterson needed a “divorce,” which, OK, hot take from Dick! — but anyone paying close attention would have clocked the Bearcats playing vastly better basketball before it came to all that.

“They have been great all year,” Miller said Saturday. “The results haven’t been great, but they have been great. They have just stayed at it and been resilient and just know good things are happening. It’s been a joy to coach this group.”

Sorry: Does that sound like the coach of a team that doesn’t have a chance to make the NCAA Tournament?

Great performances and against-all-odds vibes are not enough to get you in the field, obviously; four games does not a season make. But performances are also a crucial indicator of future bubble potential. If Cincinnati plays even half as well the rest of the way — with chances to beat a J.T. Toppin-less Texas Tech, a home game against BYU, and a trip to play bubbly TCU all still remaining — then we could be looking at one of great late-season at-large surges in Bubble Watch history, all taking place under a coach who may get fired no matter what happens from here on out. How can you not love that? It’s the sort of thing that used to get us excited about watching teams coached by Ed Cooley. (In retrospect, it was the best thing about his Providence teams.)

This is a unique form of college basketball enthusiasm. Some would call it depravity. We prefer “enthusiasm.” Let’s go Bearcats. Let’s get weird.

Housekeeping and miscellany:

• Today’s Basket Under Review Podcast, hosted by yours truly, expands the Darryn Peterson discussion (and meta-discussion, now that the whole world is paying attention). There’s also Michigan-Duke in-depth, some Houston concerns, Tate’s visit to Pauley for the Illinois buzzer-beater and the Mick Cronin reset, and a ton more. Like, subscribe, and so forth!

• The past few weeks, we’ve highlighted our switch from Strength of Record to Wins Above Bubble in each team’s topline. WAB’s importance was hammered home again last week, both in coverage of the NCAA’s media mock selection exercise — a fun old thing we did once forever ago, now resurrected for the new post-WAB world, which was awesome to see — and the early top-16 bracket reveal Saturday morning. NCAA committee members and staffers are practically screaming at people: Put WAB in your graphics! It’s going to matter a ton! We really like it! Don’t be surprised! So, you know: fair warning.

• Some email providers impose limits on email length. This is a long file, so if your email cuts off, be sure to click through to the site itself to read it all.

• There are almost certainly typos in the below copy. We are our only editor; this is a one-man show. If you spot factual mistakes or just think we should consider a team not on the page, get in touch in the comments or shoot me a note.

• NET and WAB are always current as of the previous day. Records are always up to date. Thanks as ever to Warren Nolan for his immensely helpful site.

• We wrote all of this, by hand, as nature intended. If you would like to support these efforts (and be able to comment, and join the live chats, and — at the founding tier — do a regular Zoom call with us to talk hoops) please consider a paid subscription today. Thanks!

ACC

If you had Michigan as the clear, or at least 1A, national title favorite before Saturday night — and we did — it’s worth not overreacting to one 40 minute slice of basketball. Michigan, usually a solid perimeter shooting team, went 6-of-25 from 3. Elliott Cadeau went 1-of-6 (and 1-of-8 overall). Many of those shots were well-defended, sure, but the Wolverines also missed a handful of open ones. It’s a pretty straightforward analysis. Michigan is still awesome. The end.

On the other hand: When is the last time this Michigan team needed to make 3s to win a game?

On Saturday, Duke broke the Michigan spell. Dusty May’s calculus — centered on the concept of creating the highest possible floor, exposed to the least amount of one-off variance — might not be completely airtight after all. Against almost every other team in the country, the Wolverines have lived at both rims. They gorge on layups and dunks. They grab offensive rebounds and go again. They block, or alter, or preemptively dissuade, interior shots at the other end, and they use their length to run shooters off the perimeter, filtering everything into midrange no-man’s-land. (Michigan opponents rank 250th in D1 in 3PA/FGA.) Their size and physicality overwhelm. For as good as the setup is, these are not the most free-flowing or technically skilled players in the sport (even Yaxel, who is nonetheless sensational). Michigan is brute mathematical force.

That will work 98 percent of the time. Michigan blows everyone out for a reason. But against the rare teams with size to quasi-match them, and an added dash of elite skill atop it — like, say, one with runaway Wooden Award favorite Cam Boozer, a freshman who somehow plays like a fifth-year senior and a one-and-done top-five pick all at once, whose performance against UM was eye-opening even this late in his remarkable season — May’s honed edge dissolves. It’s not like Duke shot the lights out, either. The real key was rebounding: Duke grabbed 39.4 percent of offensive boards and (crucially) 77.8 percent defensively. This is the same Michigan team that once grabbed 39 defensive rebounds in 40 minutes against Gonzaga. That never happens.

On Saturday, the Blue Devils met the toughest physical challenge in college basketball, and then used that springboard to showcase just how gifted they are, too. Michigan’s spell was broken. The best news is that there are only two or three teams that can do what Duke did in D.C. There might only be one.

Elsewhere on Tobacco Road, North Carolina is a lock. The Tar Heels have held the line since Caleb Wilson went out with his injury. That’s really all they needed to do. Yes, the NC State game was bad, and the emotions involved there probably made it feel worse for Carolina fans than any import for tournament selection — and Henri Vesaar also missed that game, by the way — but handling Syracuse and Louisville cemented things with three games to go. UNC could lose all three and hurt their seed, sure, but they’re not missing out, and besides Wilson will be back any day now.

Ironically enough, Louisville is also a lock. A pure metrics-based system — where the Cardinals are strong across the board, but particularly on the predictive front — would have made this call weeks ago. As results go, though, Louisville is 0-7 against Quad 1A opponents (Duke twice, Virginia, at Tennessee, at Arkansas, at SMU, and now at UNC) and 6-1 against Quad 1B, with no other losses on their record, which pretty much sums up the Louisville experience this year: good team, with notable flaws, that hasn’t gone above and beyond in any of its wins all season. As a program, the Cardinals haven’t beaten a top 25 team on the road for five years. That stat is damning in its own way, given the expectations in November. But it won’t keep them out of the field.

Lock: Duke, Virginia, North Carolina, Louisville
Should be in: NC State, Miami, Clemson
Work to do: SMU, Virginia Tech, California

NC State (19-8, 10-4; NET: 26, WAB: 31): NC State throttled UNC 82-58 last Tuesday, a cathartic win for a long-anguished fan base that lives for moments of victory over the despised Tar Heels. In rivalries like these, no fan cares who’s injured or not; the win itself, and the anguish of your rivals, are all that matters. NC State’s players, though, might have gone a little overboard. They showed up to the postgame press conference with a bedazzled belt, an apparent reference to UNC star freshman Caleb Wilson last summer saying UNC was going to “put the belt on everybody.” One problem: Wilson didn’t play. He has a broken hand. Center Henri Veesaar was also injured. Quadir Copeland apparently told Wilson to “lace up next time.” But he has a broken hand! UNC’s two best players were out! The Wolfpack seemed determined to proceed with their postgame talk-that-talk plan despite the circumstances of the win itself. Not a huge deal, but it felt a smidge odd, especially for players that have so thoroughly frustrated their own coach so often this season.

Miami (21-6, 10-4; NET: 35, WAB: 32): Despite a valiant performance in a good game (and a pair of blitzing runs, one in each half, to counter Virginia’s reliably steady churn) the Hurricanes were a relative afterthought in Charlottesville Saturday. The real story was the dedication of the JPJ court to beloved former coach Tony Bennett, who, in typical Tony Bennett fashion, asked that every single player, walk-on, assistant coach, support staffer and manager’s name be written in small text within Bennett’s signature on the floor. “So, forever, we will be on the court together,” Bennett said. Pretty cool. The game also produced this very funny tweet:

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There is no avoiding it now. The time for taking Darryn Peterson’s bizarre freshman season at something like face value — the days of accepting the implausible explanations, vaguely worded quasi-injuries and sudden pregame illnesses with a mostly open mind — are over. Wednesday was it. The benefit of the doubt is officially gone.

What happened Wednesday? Peterson started at Oklahoma State. He had 23 points on 6-of-10 shooting from 3. Some of the shots were not guarded well. Some of them were barraged by multiple defenders. The distinction made no difference. The potential No. 1 overall pick didn’t so much play at Gallagher-Iba as float above it, an otherworldly being briefly deigning to reveal his true nature to the cowering, huddled mortals below. Other than one early open-floor sigh-I-guess-I-have-to drive, Peterson didn’t even bother with the thing he is arguably best at: gliding past helpless college defenders on his way to the rim.

He was somewhere between a former pro showing up to your church pickup run and Darth Vader at the end of Rogue One: immense power, casually wielded.

And then, two minutes and 20 seconds into the second half, this happened:

Peterson didn’t play in the game again.

This sequence of events, in and of itself, should no longer surprise anyone. Peterson has done versions of this all season — when he has been on the court in the first place. He missed eight of Kansas’s first 12 games entirely. He has appeared 15 times in Kansas’s 26 fixtures overall. He has played more than 23 minutes in just eight of those 15 appearances. He has played 38 percent of available minutes this season.

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Peterson has, on multiple occasions, taken himself out of games he was dominating. He had 26 points in 23 minutes at UCF (a game Kansas eventually lost) before missing the second half with cramps. He had 18 points in the first half against BYU before shutting it down. And he has also suddenly and mysteriously withdrawn from lineups altogether: Despite practicing and getting out of bed and going to shootaround and arriving at Allen Fieldhouse hours before Feb. 9’s massive game against Arizona, Peterson didn’t play at all, telling Kansas’s staff a few minutes before tip he was still experiencing “flu-like symptoms.”

All this has fueled boundless online cynicism. Peterson has been criticized for abandoning his teammates, questioned about whether he actually likes basketball at all, and even pilloried by Kansas fans for turning a proud program in a resurgent season into his bespoke mechanism for professional advancement. Fans have openly guessed Peterson is doing all of this on purpose: Generate the bare minimum number of highlights, in the bare minimum possible minutes, to maintain your status as the No. 1 overall pick, and do nothing more. He already has a slander nickname: “DNP.” It’s pretty funny, to be fair.

But all along it has also been possible, for those so inclined, to take Peterson’s unreliability in good faith. Maybe he really is cramping! Maybe he’s just worried about his body! Maybe he was sick! Why does he play 35 minutes some nights, then, hmm? Why do his teammates all seem to like him?

Besides Peterson’s own inscrutability — he doesn’t give interviews, do posts, or ever even show the slightest emotion on the court — the main reason you could plausibly sustain such a generous interpretation was Bill Self. Self has stuck to the company line. This is a Hall of Fame coach with little to lose, with a long history of either directly or winkingly — in a language that local media especially can fluently understand — getting his message across about players. Self has not only allowed Peterson to come and go but explained the absences at every turn. Yep, he was cramping up. We knew he might be touch and go. Yep, just didn’t feel well. Nope, wasn’t right. Yep, we’ll see where he is at practice. Hopefully we can get him back soon, but I thought our guys did a great job adjusting, etc. Rinse, repeat.

Until Wednesday. Wednesday night was the first time all season Bill Self came remotely close to sounding as annoyed at his star player as the rest of the world assumes he must be.

A reporter asked Self how he has “navigated” the “couple of times” Kansas has had Peterson play well in a first half before excusing himself from the second. If you watch the clip — and you should, because vocal tone and facial expression matters here, too — you can actually see Self, in real time, measuring out the weight of his response:

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On Jan. 17, 2023, Jerome Tang gave the most famous speech of his Kansas State tenure.

His first Wildcats team had just beaten Kansas — K-State’s first win over KU in four years — and after the students had stormed the court, Tang ran to the Bramlage Coliseum public address mic and delivered a performance for the ages.

“This is not about who we just beat,” he screamed. “This is about us winning.” Then he put a stop to the (expletive) KU chant that had been going on all evening in the student section by leading a chant that involved three simple letters — KSU. “It is amazing what you can accomplish when you do it out of the emotions of love and care and passion,” Tang said.

Then he promised more.

“I told y’all we would get you one court storming,” Tang said. “From here on out, expect to win.”

We thought about that moment a lot the past few days, after news broke that Kansas State was firing Tang — for cause, they told him — following a Feb. 11 press conference in which he said his players “do not deserve to wear this uniform, and there will be very few of them in it next year.” That press conference went viral, which is to say it not only got a lot of clicks but led SportsCenter and PTI, and the widespread negative reaction to it, and not at all the monstrous buyout in the contract he signed with K-State a couple years ago, is what “really concerned” athletic director Gene Taylor, and prompted him to try firing Tang without paying him the $18.67 million the coach would otherwise seem to be owed.

“There’s language in his contract about certain things that could potentially bring embarrassment,” Taylor said. “Basically, his comments about the student-athletes and the negative reaction to those comments from sources, both nationally and locally, is where it kind of felt like I needed to make the decision.”

Tang has lawyered up, those lawyers are already beating the drums of war, and without rendering a legal opinion one way or the other — let’s just say it KSU’s assertions seem like a stretch, but what do we know — what we can say is that absolutely no one standing on that Bramlage court three years and one month ago could have foreseen Tang’s departure going like this.

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The funny thing? The stuff that once made K-State fans want to run through a brick wall — that sort of cringey-slash-inspirational speaking schtick, the visit to FAU’s locker room after the 2023 Elite Eight loss, the press conferences about attitude and effort and 6 am practices and guys not earning the right to wear the glorious purple and white, and all the other stuff that seems extra-cool when times are good — was what would eventually drive K-State fans extra-nuts. After three years of failure, people only get sick of you faster, and from what we can gather people there are really sick of Jerome Tang.

But that is always the case. Whether a coach is stoic or verbose, how fans respond is always only ever about whether you win as much as they think you should. In the modern game, those expectations come with a quantifiable monetary value: Are you generating enough NIL budget to recruit quality players? And, if you are, are you using that money to construct quality teams?

This was the real recurring sin of Tang’s K-State.

By all accounts, Wildcats boosters responded to the Elite Eight appearance with robust financial enthusiasm. Every spring under Tang, K-State was always in the conversation for almost every top portal target. It often landed those players. The rosters never made any sense. We still can’t get our head around why Tang made former Illinois forward Coleman Hawkins — a complementary thread-weaver of a player, perfect for the right kind of system but not a star on his own — one of the highest-paid stars in the sport two summers ago, or how he was supposed to pair with Dug McDaniel, exactly, or how Kansas State was going to do anything stylistically differently from the previous season, when the Wildcats were also terrible offensively.

This summer at least made a bit more conceptual sense: If you’re going to go all out for a super-expensive transfer, at least make it someone like P.J. Haggerty, who can have the ball in his hands all the time, run ballscreens, and simplify your offense through sheer individual skill. But that hasn’t worked either, because the rest of the team is still too turnover prone and rim-averse, and in fact the one thing the former Baylor defensive specialist’s teams did reasonably well — guard people — has now vanished from Manhattan entirely.

This is surely what prompted Tang’s outburst last week, when his team gave up 92 points to freaking Cincinnati, this suspicion that the only explanation was a lack of effort. Probably correct! But guess what: It’s also your job to coach effort. It’s your job to recruit guys who will try hard. This is college basketball! That’s all your job!

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Sometimes, people act like NIL spending is a guaranteed shortcut to winning, that certain programs can always solve all of their problems with more money, that all you really need is a big pot of cash. It just keeps being wrong. Look around the country. Kentucky spent $22 million on too many players; right now it’s a seven-seed. BYU paid a freshman a gazillion dollars, and boss-moved Rob Wright out of Baylor, but had (apparently) exactly zero dollars left over for usable depth. Texas Tech chose to reup J.T. Toppin but had to let Darrion Williams walk; they haven’t missed a beat. Williams’ new school, NC State, is still suffering from failure to launch. Purdue is never mentioned among the top NIL spenders; the Boilermakers are always good anyway. Nebraska isn’t paying crazy money for its best team in program history. Michigan splurged on Yaxel Lendeborg, sure, but found undervalued bargains around the margins. Virginia spent big on an overhauled roster, but Ryan Odom knew what he wanted and was flexible enough to make it work, and so it has. And on and on.

Every year, the teams that succeed look different. There are so many ways to win. There are so many marginal advantages, and underrated prospects, and types of team you can put together — with players who make sense in lineups together, players you trust to play hard no matter what.

Money helps, sure, but it’s not an exact prerequisite. It only matters if you know how to use it.

However Tang’s contract plays out, and for whatever he did to rhetorically annoy K-State fans along the way, his biggest problem had very little to do with brash proclamations or viral press conferences. It was far more elemental: Modern recruiting is still not about parts. It’s always, and forever, about the whole.

Housekeeping:

• For a bunch more Jerome Tang talk, as well as stuff on that brilliant Iowa State-Houston game, the Providence bummer, the great games to come this week, and more, check out the latest episode of the Basket Under Review Podcast (like and subscribe, etc!):

• We’ve switched to highlighting WAB (wins above bubble) instead of SOR (strength of record) at the top of team blurbs. There’s not a ton of difference, in terms of reading this Bubble Watch, but the committee leaned on WAB more noticeably in the last couple of Marches (and in-the-room NCAA folks are now openly suggesting broadcasters pay more attention to it, like, yesterday), so it’s worth emphasizing.

• Some email providers impose limits on email length. This is a long file, so if your email cuts off, be sure to click through to the site itself to read it all.

• There are almost certainly typos in the below copy. We are our only editor; this is a one-man show. If you spot factual mistakes or just think we should consider a team not on the page, get in touch in the comments or shoot me a note.

• NET and WAB are always current as of the previous day. Records are always up to date. Thanks as ever to Warren Nolan for his immensely helpful site.

• We wrote all of this, by hand, as nature intended. If you would like to support these efforts (and be able to comment, and join the live chats, and — at the founding tier — do a regular Zoom call with us to talk hoops) please consider a paid subscription today. Thanks!

ACC

It’s Feb. 17, and Virginia is a lock. This is hardly an Earth-melting hot take, given the Cavaliers’ steady campaign. But if you zoom all the way out — back to, say, last spring, or even to the fall of 2024, when Tony Bennett abruptly ended his career — it’s pretty freaking incredible.

Bennett’s retirement was a huge blow. For UVa fans, especially those raised on the previous decade, it would have felt like Virginia basketball itself was over. The two were synonymous. Bennett’s principles were infused into every nook and cranny. Slow pace, pack-line defense, slow-burn roster builds, redshirt projects, collective development: They were always anachronistic ideas, but they worked, right up to the point they didn’t.

But there was very little evidence that a new, modern, transfer-heavy approach would work at Virginia, either. Bennett’s aversion to overt NIL spending made it unclear whether the program would be able to marshal competitive resources if he left. Even if they did, it was an open question whether any replacement could rebuild a roster quickly enough to win right away, without making fans feel like they didn’t recognize their program at all.

Ryan Odom pulled it all off. In his low-key, straightforward way, Odom paid homage to Bennett and to his underlying program pillars … while also absorbing a pent-up NIL supply and deployed it masterfully. He and his staff built a balanced, veteran roster from every which direction: big international prospects, mid-major up-transfers, pedigreed talent once recruited by bluebloods. (He also re-recruited Charlottesville native Chance Mallory, who is even better than anyone thought, and looks like the foundation of the program long after the current wave of guys are gone — a player with whom fans can fall unreservedly in love.) At 22-3, Odom has won enough already this season to prove Virginia doesn’t have to be any one thing. A new era has arrived.

Lock: Duke, Virginia
Should be in: Louisville, North Carolina, Clemson
Work to do: NC State, Miami, SMU, Virginia Tech, California

Louisville (19-6, 8-4; NET: 12, WAB: 21): Mikel Brown’s last two games, a 118-77 (!) win over NC State and Saturday’s more perfunctory victory over Baylor: 74 points, 12 rebounds, eight assists, eight steals, 8-of-16 from 2, 14-of-21 from 3. Ell. Oh. Ell. Expecting Brown to maintain that sort of pace is silly, but it certainly bodes well for Louisville’s ceiling moving forward, and it recontextualizes the feels-like-it-should-be-better team sheet: four of this team’s six defeats came when Brown was injured in January. It wouldn’t be a total surprise if the committee ends up slotting the Cardinals a bit higher up the curve than many mock brackets are currently accounting for.

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