Bubble Watch: Indiana can't lose

And other galaxy-brain thoughts on an overwhelming day of college basketball

Indiana fans depressed at Thursday’s loss to Oregon, and fretting about their chances of making the 2025 NCAA Tournament, hear these words and rejoice: There are no bad outcomes for Indiana now.

Wait, where are you going? Stop. Don’t walk away. Take a pamphlet. Hear us out!

Think about it! Either the Hoosiers:

a) squeak into the tournament and go sell an inordinate share of tickets in Dayton next week, or

b) the Mike Woodson era, and all of the toxicity it has produced, is officially over.

Oumar Ballo reflected on this after Indiana’s loss to Oregon Thursday: the DMs, the death threats, the fact that a small section of Indiana’s fan base (Ballo rightly noted that the vocal minority) descended into a level of rage this season that made things extra difficult for a team that knew it was underachieving and letting people down.

(This is endemic to social media, of course. We would really encourage college basketball players to never look at direct messages or, frankly, any social media app. Just use your Messages and WhatsApp and delete the rest. Every 10 nice DMs you get will be overtaken, mentally, by the one awful one you received. That is how the human brain works. It’s why nasty stuff goes viral. Negativity sticks. You can opt out, and you should. It’s also hard to do, and not just for young people, and saying “hey come on just ignore it” does not excuse the troglodytes who think they’re entitled to send hateful messages to college basketball players between shifts at the correctional facility.)

When the school announced Woodson’s departure in February, the vibes improved, and so did the team. These things do not feel disconnected.

There is still a reasonable chance the Hoosiers end up in the NCAA Tournament. It’s a coin-flip, truly. If you like North Carolina’s wins (note: you don’t), you should like Indiana’s; they won at Michigan State, beat Purdue by 15, and didn’t lose a game outside quadrant 1 all season. If you dislike other bubble teams’ bad losses, well, Indiana doesn’t have any of those.

But IU’s very average metrics and nonconference scheduling blah-ness could be the difference. It is hard to miss the similarities between this team sheet …

… and 2024 Oklahoma’s:

Indiana’s is probably better, not least because the committee has a long history of punishing teams with truly bad nonconference schedules (as opposed to merely mediocre ones). But as with North Carolina, only losing to good teams — but doing it all the time! — is not an accomplishment in and of itself.

Important note: This bubble is not last year’s bubble. It’s always different. It’s all relative. So it will be close. It will be a committee argument, a last-team-in-first-team-out sort of deal. We could offer a prediction, but that would be pointless. Whatever. Indiana gets in, great. Indiana misses out, great. Either you play in the tournament and try to make a run, or you start building toward a more positive, less noxious future.

There are, perversely, no bad options.

The usual housekeeping:

• As mentioned Wednesday, we’re essentially treating this as a running file that we send out to subscribers every morning. Some team blurbs may not be updated if said teams haven’t played a game since last writing. Sometimes they will be anyway! (Most of them will be.)

• 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 (where you can use the navigation on the left side of your screen to scroll to conference sections quickly!) 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 think we missed a team or a relevant piece of info, 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.

• We wrote all of this, by hand, as nature intended. If you would like to support these efforts (and be able to comment, and join the live chats, and — at the founding tier — do a regular Zoom call with us to talk hoops, and stick around throughout the ever-morphing coaching and portal insanity to come) please consider a paid subscription today. Thanks!

ACC

One thing that mattered above all at the ACC tournament Thursday: Cooper Flagg’s ankle. The Duke star took a nasty fall on a high-rising rebound against Georgia Tech — a game the Yellow Jackets looked frisky in, for what it’s worth, before eventually being overcome in the second half — and looked genuinely badly hurt at first. It didn’t help that Flagg was later photographed in a wheelchair in the Spectrum Center tunnel. Duke fans, and really anybody who wants to see the locked-in No. 1 pick and co-favorite for national player of the year play in the NCAA Tournament next week, immediately freaked out.

Flagg later came out and sat on the bench, which was a mildly promising sign. (He wasn’t, like, being rushed to the hospital, or whatever.) His parents in the stands were also relatively calm, which prompted Corey Alexander, always ready to just say … stuff, to drop one of the funnier commentator comments of the week: "You can see, of course, tremendous concern on the faces of Ralph and Kelly Flagg, Cooper's parents. But I can tell you one thing: They are most concerned about the Blue Devils winning this game." Press X to doubt.