Bubble Watch: Cincinnati lives, and gives the bubble life
A late-season contender emerges
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.
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.
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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.
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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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