Bubble Watch: Everybody good keeps losing

No new locks, but plenty of at-large intrigue, in the second Bubble Watch of the season

OK, yes, admittedly, the whole lock thing is kind of silly. Every year, we give ourselves a somewhat needless challenge: That to call a team a lock we have to feel confident there is no way that team could totally fall off a cliff and eventually miss the field. Preferably it should be a matter of practical mathematical certainty.

This is an overcomplicated way to do stuff. Think about all of the teams we could remove from this page if we started to fudge this tradition a bit. We’ve been tempted in the past! Of course Arizona is going to make the tournament, right? Why not cut out a few thousand words?

As longtime readers know: Trae Young’s Oklahoma year is why. Shudder.

Really, though, the goofy lock protocol is also a big part of the fun. It’s more enjoyable when it’s more meaningful, for starters, when teams’ fans (especially fans of teams that aren’t good every year) can celebrate the news. But it also gives us a chance to include all kinds of different teams in Bubble Watch all season, and to not worry about clinically narrowing things down to the (say) 20 teams for 12 spots that you eventually have to focus on in this space in late February and March. It allows us to cover the sport more broadly, which is more fun than obsessing about a bracket we won’t see for two more months.

So we’re going to keep treating locks the same as ever, which is especially noteworthy this week; every team we planned on locking sooner rather than later (especially Houston and Arizona) lost in the interim. Indeed, last week offered up one of the more topsy turvy series of results in recent college hoops history, at least where the AP poll voters are concerned. Kentucky was probably not the sixth-best team in the country, and so the No. 6-ranked Wildcats losing as 2.5-point underdogs at Texas A&M Saturday wasn’t as big of a deal as poll suggests, but still: Lots of good teams — No. 1, No. 2, No. 3, No. 5 and No. 6 — lost last week.

So there are no new locks this week. But there is a big brand new Bubble Watch for you, chock full of takes on teams of all descriptions. Let’s dive in.

Some housekeeping notes:

• The distinctions between “should be in” and “work to do” are pretty fuzzy this time of year. All of this will matter a lot more in, like, a month.

• 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 SOS 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.

ACC

Should be in: North Carolina, Duke, Clemson
Work to do: Wake Forest, Virginia Tech, Miami, Virginia, NC State

North Carolina (13-3, 5-0; NET: 7, SOS: 11): Tar Heels fans have to be loving this. Plenty of them would have been deeply concerned by last season’s disaster, and not just because the team had a down year. You can swallow the occasional bad season when you’re sure you have a coach who could win a national title in the years that follow it. It happens. It’s when you’re not sure, early in the tenure of a new guy succeeding the old legend, that bad seasons feel like existential threats. What if we’re never good again? Turns out North Carolina isn’t just good; North Carolina feels exactly like North Carolina should. Saturday’s win over Syracuse — a 103-67 demolition in which UNC didn’t have to shoot the ball well from the perimeter, so successful were they at generating a constant stream of easy looks on fast and secondary breaks — was possibly the most this team has felt like classic UNC in the past 20 months.

Duke (13-3, 4-1; NET: 14, SOS: 84): There is every chance the Blue Devils will arrive at the Dean Dome Feb. 3 having won their last 12 games. They won’t necessarily waltz through Clemson and (at) Virginia Tech the week before — Saturday’s home game against Georgia Tech was too close for comfort — but the current ACC feels like it’s an obvious two-team race and the distance between Duke and UNC and the rest of the league should only serve to enhance both rivalry teams’ reputations by the time they take the court early next month. That game is going to be great regardless, but if both teams win out on the way it will shape up like a classic.

Clemson (12-4, 2-3; NET: 27, SOS: 15): Should we be concerned about Clemson? Specifically: Should we be worried about Clemson’s defense? The Tigers have been extremely lenient on that end of the floor in league play to date, allowing an ACC-worst 1.17 points per possession. Five games is a small sample, and Clemson has faced plenty of good offense in that start, but Saturday’s 89-78 home win over Boston College, while easy enough, was yet another slightly questionable defensive display — one in which P.J. Hall’s flexible brilliance and Joe Girard’s perimeter shotmaking nonetheless made the final outcome academic. Something to watch, anyway.

Wake Forest (12-4, 4-1; NET: 46, SOS: 142): This is one of the most talented teams in the ACC — arguably more talented, one to five, than everyone but UNC and Duke. The Demon Deacons’ relative lack of assists (they record one on just 44 percent of made field goals, 309th-most in the country) seems like a weird stat in the abstract, and then you watch them play, and watch Kevin Miller and Hunter Sallis and Cameron Hildreth constantly set themselves up for good looks with savvy decisions and sharp on-ball movement, and you immediately get it. This team underachieved in the nonconference, which is why it is so often seen along the bubble in current brackets, but on the floor it is absolutely good enough to firm up a tournament spot in the next 11 weeks.