Bubble Watch: Everybody thinks they're in

Crazy declarations abound, but their genesis is what makes college hoops great

Photo credit: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

WASHINGTON — At 2:11 am ET Friday morning, the final buzzer sounded on New Mexico’s 76-66 win over Boise State. The declaration in the broadcast booth was swift and definitive: “Dad (St. John’s coach Rick Pitino) might still be on the bubble, but Richard Pitino? He’s not!”

If you were awake for this, and you probably weren’t, you might have noted that, well, no: New Mexico was still very much on the bubble, likely much more so than the elder Pitino’s Red Storm. On Thursday, ESPN’s ACC broadcast featured an insistent theme: Not only would Pittsburgh and Virginia get in the field, but Wake Forest — considered out of contention by almost every bracketeer in the land — would get in too.

You could find some version of this at every press conference of every bubble team in the country these past two days. On Friday, interim coach Jake Diebler said his inspired but nonetheless long shot Ohio State Buckeyes had “earned the right to play in the postseason.” At the same time Diebler was delivering that statement of faith in Minneapolis, here in Capital One Arena Pittsburgh coach Jeff Capel was delivering closing arguments in the case of ACC v. Bracketology. Capel noted his team’s performance in ACC play, its metrics, that its nonconference schedule wasn’t any worse than many Big 12 teams (not entirely true, but whatever), and that Pitt had tried to schedule well and didn’t know Missouri and West Virginia would suddenly be terrible this year (fair).

“I don’t understand all of it,” Capel said. “I don’t think (if we don’t make the tournament) it will be because of that. But I’m not a bracketology expert. I’m a basketball coach.”

Capel didn’t have to deliver the world’s most stirring argument. He had the wind at his back. The advantage he wielded instead was the game itself — the performance everyone sitting in his press conference, and thousands of amped-up fans, had just witnessed. Pittsburgh had taken on likely No. 1 seed North Carolina and looked, for almost all of the 40 minutes they sparred, very nearly as tough, athletic and talented as one of the best teams in the country. He had the coach of that team, Hubert Davis, available to vouch for Pitt (“That is definitively an NCAA Tournament team … and a team that can go far in the tournament,” Davis said.) He had every ACC-inclined broadcast partner and media member, who likely spent most of their basketball consumption time this season watching specific ACC teams play the rest of the league, and who had just watched Pitt in person, right in front of their faces, there to back him up. They could trust their own eyes. Pitt was good.

This is a powerful effect. It leads to the kinds of extremely confident proclamations you get this time of year — that six ACC teams will make the tournament, that New Mexico is a lock, that Utah, or whoever, deserves another look.

When you do a thing like Bubble Watch for a couple of months, and spend a lot of time trying to track what actually matters about teams and their resumes, mid-March’s sudden deluge of pointed opinions can be disorienting. Sorry, what? Who are you putting in the tournament? In which tournament? But then you go out to cover a league tourney for a night and you remember why this happens: Because most people can’t (or don’t want to) watch all of this stuff, and because we are humans who give in to all sorts of cognitive biases, and because you just watched Pitt play a really good team in a juiced arena and honestly you know what Pitt looks pretty freaking good.

This is not a bad thing. In fact, it’s actively good. It is ultimately rooted in tradition, in the classic regionality of college sports leagues, in the impulse to vouch only for what you see. Conferences are supposed to exist in their own little worlds, with their own little media ecosystems. They are not supposed to be nationalized collections of vaguely associated teams. They are supposed to be culturally cloistered. They should inspire loyalty.

Next year, the ACC will add SMU, Stanford, and Cal. You wonder whether your average ACC fan in downtown DC, or your average Durham-area ACC media type, will care one lick whether any of those three teams get in tournament, whether they deserve it or not. We doubt it.

Automatic bids from non-Bubble Watch (one-bid) leagues: 21
Locks: 35
Should be in: 6
Work to do: 4
Waiting game: 7

Housekeeping:

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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 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

Locks: North Carolina, Duke, Clemson
Waiting game: Wake Forest, Pittsburgh, Virginia