Bubble Watch: Cherish this

Great hoops, bubble chaos, and a sad reminder of what's at stake on the best non-tourney day of the season

Photo credit: AP

You have to hand it to Greg Sankey: He is not even pretending anymore.

So it was that one of the most glorious days on the college basketball calendar — the closest thing to the first two days of the NCAA Tournament that exists in this month-long carnival of ball — tipped off not merely with early afternoon basketball for your cubicle viewing pleasure but, also, alas, with an important dispatch from the office of the commissioner of the Southeastern Conference, who finally let the mask slip all the way off in a phone call with ESPN’s Pete Thamel:

In a recent phone interview, Sankey acknowledged the tournament is one of the few things that bonds the disparate world of Division I together. "Nothing remains static," he told ESPN. "I think we have to think about the dynamics around Division I and the tournament."

He added that recent runs by UCLA from the First Four to the Final Four in 2021 and Syracuse's run to the round of 16 beginning with a play-in game in Dayton in 2018 show the caliber of power-conference teams on the fringe of the NCAA tournament.

"That just tells you that the bandwidth inside the top 50 is highly competitive," Sankey said. "We are giving away highly competitive opportunities for automatic qualifiers [from smaller leagues], and I think that pressure is going to rise as we have more competitive basketball leagues at the top end because of expansion."

Listen to that: We are giving away. To Sankey, there is nothing charming about Cinderella, about low and mid-major teams from smaller conferences. He doesn’t get the appeal. Upsets in the NCAA Tournament mean nothing to him; the romance of the underdog doesn’t register. To the rest of us, the presence of these teams — tiny No. 16 seed Fairleigh Dickinson roping down a literal giant — is exactly what makes the NCAA Tournament so special, so worth preserving in its current form. Sankey isn’t just ambivalent about those teams; he actually sees them as a drag. Mid-majors are freeloaders. We’re just giving these spots away.

No single person is more responsible for trying to wreck what makes the NCAA Tournament great. Sankey has applied nearly constant pressure to the NCAA to remake basketball’s marquee event to his conference’s liking, and he has the leverage to do so; he is one of a very few people in college sports who could decide to take his ball and go home. And so the NCAA is talking about expanding the NCAA Tournament to 76 or 80 teams not even because the people in Indianapolis want to, but because they feel like they need to just to keep the wolves from the door.

The blueprint the NCAA is trying to prevent has already happened in the NIT. Last summer, plans for a Fox Sports-led breakaway postseason event featuring power-conference teams left out of the NCAA Tournament was mooted. In the fall, the NCAA announced it would change the structure of the NIT: Instead of giving conference regular season champions an automatic bid, the tournament would instead reserve two spots each for the top six conferences. Just like that — with the threat of outside involvement from power leagues and their TV partners — mid-majors got left in the dust.

“The current path forward is extremely problematic and concerning,” said Julie Roe Lach, commissioner of the Horizon League, which lost its automatic bid to the NIT — a genuinely devastating loss for a small league that only ever gets one big dance bid.

When we spoke in December, Lach had already spent weeks fighting back against the NCAA’s NIT change, but by the time we spoke her attentions had turned to NCAA president Charlie Baker’s just-unveiled plan to allow colleges to compensate athletes directly, which had already buried the NIT nitty-gritty down the list of priorities.

“All of this talking about the NIT (among fellow commissioners and the NCAA) happened before President Baker’s memo,” Roe Lach said. “And then all of a sudden it’s like, ‘What is the future of Division I? That becomes the priority.’”

This is the pace at which college sports is changing. Some of these changes are good. (Athletes should be compensated, and solving that difficult problem in ways that don’t involve asking fans to fund NIL collectives is worth trying.) And some of these changes are very bad.

Sankey, for his part, wants to change everything you love about college basketball’s postseason, wants to leave the Horizon League strivers of the world in the past, so that a 6-12 SEC team with a 2-15 Quad 1 record can be the 95th team in the field. This pressure has already succeeded in changing the NIT. It is what Sankey would love to do to the best, most beloved competition in sports.

What a buzzkill. Thamel’s story Thursday was a cruel reminder, on the hopeful morning of one of the best days of the year, of how fleeting all of this is. It clarified, yet again, that the people most in charge of college sports see it entirely as a method for zero-sum resource extraction, an IRL chance to blob in a 4X strategy game, as one more acquisitive test.

Sankey has previously danced around this idea. He has alluded to it, talking in vague terms about “access” for “student-athletes.” The mask is off now. In case you thought otherwise, know now: Sankey doesn’t love this stuff the way you do. He doesn’t love any of it. What’s worse: It doesn’t occur to him why love would have anything to do with it at all.

Automatic bids from non-Bubble Watch (one-bid) leagues: 21
Locks: 33
Should be in: 9
Work to do: 6
Waiting game: 4

Housekeeping:

• 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 SOR 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

NC State! The Wolfpack didn’t blow Syracuse out of Capital One Arena Wednesday and then call it a day; they turned around Thursday night and sent Duke packing, too. The latter was more impressive, even if a missed dunk down the stretch made the game way closer in the final moments than it needed to be.

Duke looked like early-season Duke, which is to say it got a magnificent performance from Kyle Filipowski (28 points, 14 rebounds, 13-of-20 from the field), a bit of bonus production from one of the supporting guys (in this case, Mark Mitchell) and basically nothing of note from anyone else. The bench didn’t manage a point. A conference tournament defeat is hardly a tragedy; indeed, it often seems to do teams good. But the Blue Devils’ reversion, their loss of the more flowing and well-rounded form they found in the course of ACC play, is an actual concern.

Locks: North Carolina, Duke, Clemson
Should be in: Virginia
Work to do: Pittsburgh
Waiting game: Wake Forest

Wake Forest (20-13, 11-9; NET: 36, SOR: 63): The Demon Deacons are just about done. Nobody tell Cory Alexander, who during the first half of Boston College-Virginia Thursday night declared that not only would the victorious Pitt Panthers get in the field (maybe!), that Wake would also get in (um) and that the ACC would get six teams in the field in (we’re paraphrasing here) acknowledgement the league wasn’t as bad as the haters have declared. (No.) Or, well, actually, it’s sort of our job to tell him: Wake Forest almost certainly isn’t making the tournament. Crazier things have happened, we guess, but 1-8 in Quadrant 1 (that lone win, over Duke, coming at home) with a bad SOR, a 2-9 road record and predictive metrics (save KenPom.com) that no longer flatter is not a recipe for an at-large bid, especially when Wake was already outside the bracket looking in Wednesday night. All of the above would look much different had Wake not responded to beating Duke Feb. 24 with three straight losses to ND, Virginia Tech and Georgia Tech. Win two of those games, and they’re probably in. Instead, the comedown is going to cost them.