Bubble Watch: Final form
Wake fails to walk the walk, the Pac-12 limps away, UConn flows, Indiana reels, the value of league titles, the glories of Arch Madness, and much more

This year’s first Bubble Watch — Buzzer’s inaugural continuation of this long-running and strangely well-read column — published Jan. 9. In two months since, 2023-24 found its rhythm. Fortunes have waxed and waned. The word count has ballooned and deflated. Now, at last, we have arrived at the final weekend of the regular season armed not only with the usual mild onset of carpal tunnel but with a pretty good idea of where the bubble picture stands, and why.
The math is as follows, unless we screwed it up, which is eminently possible:
Automatic bids from non-Bubble Watch (one-bid) leagues: 20
Locks: 32
Should be in: 7
Work to do: 20
That is a fair number of teams with work to do at this stage of the process, true. Still, few of the teams on the page feel like huge stretches or are just there because we think it’s funny. (OK, maybe Ohio State. You got us there.) The fact is there is a bulging group of teams bundled relatively close together in our reckoning, all of whose resumes range from intriguing to meh, but who could still change these fine margins — or reinforce them — with a win or two in the next week.
Conference tournaments have already begun. Everything will happen fast now. What you see below is, barring true surprises and a few more cursory locks, how things are going to look until Selection Sunday.
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 always current as of the previous day. Records are always up to date. Thanks as ever to Warren Nolan for his immensely helpful site.
Lastly, thanks to all of you. Subscription numbers continue to grow super well, and it’s been so gratifying to have so many of you reading, commenting and chatting along. Cheers!
ACC
The ACC is culturally blasé about the regular season championship, but we have to say it is a thrill that a share of the conference title (“title”) is still up for grabs for Duke on Saturday. That game didn't need higher stakes, of course. But it doesn't hurt.
Locks: North Carolina, Duke, Clemson
Work to do: Wake Forest, Pittsburgh, Virginia, Syracuse
Wake Forest (18-12, 10-9; NET: 42, SOR: 69): For much of the season, Wake Forest was defiant in the face of bracketologists, one in particular, who have questioned the team and the ACC more broadly. We've often, counterintuitively, taken Wake's side. This was clearly a talented team capable of playing really well, a team with undeniably strong predictive metrics, a team that just needed to break through against a big opponent to prove its quality, the type of team you could forgive for getting frustrated about nerd stuff like NET ratings and quadrants. Then the breakthrough came against Duke Feb. 24, and lost in the court-storm discourse after the fact was that the Demon Deacons had verified everything supporters thought about them all along, not to mention punched their tourney ticket in the process. Catharsis was achieved. A proud and long-suffering program, whose fans we've always liked, was officially back.
Here's what this team has done since: lost at Notre Dame, lost at Virginia Tech, lost at home to Georgia Tech.
This is, obviously, not how you get in the tournament. Worse, it makes a mockery of all of that defiance early in the year. We always thought Wake was good enough to prove itself when it really mattered. Maybe that will still happen. But this team is now 42nd in the NET — it was 25th after the Duke win — with a bad SOR, a 2-6 record against Q1 (both wins coming at home) and a 5-5 mark against Q2. There is almost no reason to think the committee would put Wake Forest in the field at the moment, and the Demon Deacons have no one but themselves to blame.
Pittsburgh (20-10, 11-8; NET: 44, SOR: 49): Here's a question we didn't foresee ourselves asking a few weeks ago, a question that shows you how far Wake has fallen: Of the two, wouldn't you rather put Pitt in the field? The Panthers are also 2-6 against Quadrant 1 with a win at Duke, but theirs came at Cameron Indoor and in Charlottesville, which whatever UVa's issues is never easy to pull off. They also have a better record against Quadrant 2, a similar strength of schedule, and a significantly better SOR. The only unfavorable comparison is noncon SOS; Pitt played one of the worst schedules in the country. (It's a schedule so bad it makes Jeff Capel's complaints about Big 12 teams beating up on bad opponents to goose the NET especially laughable — man, you had your chance to do the same). The committee traditionally hates bad noncon schedules, but Wake's (246th) isn't so much better that we wouldn't put Pitt above them on the curve in the aggregate, whether or not either team is in the field.
Virginia (21-9, 12-7; NET: 50, SOR: 35): Virginia hasn't played since Saturday's dispiriting 73-48 loss at Duke, which followed a 41 point outing at Virginia Tech and 44 whole points against UNC, so we don't have much of an update to offer in this blurb. What we do have are the contents of a real text sent to the Watch by a friend and Virginia fan in dire need of either a hug or a beer, or both, who shall remain anonymous:
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