Bubble Watch: Lessons of a bracket reveal

What can a fake slice of a nonexistent tournament teach us? (Spoiler: not much)

Good, pointless fun

Lesson one: Thank God this isn’t college football.

On the football side, you see, they do fake mock brackets every week. It’s awful! None of it actually matters until the season is over and all of the games are played, but of course that’s not really the point. Content must be generated. The reaction economy requires inputs. Debate must be embraced. And so every seven days the football committee gets out there and reveals its latest pointless midseason playoff rankings anyway, and then everyone spends the next several days arguing about said pointless rankings, until it’s time to run it back the following Monday at the appointed time.

Whatever you think of the NCAA Tournament selection committee’s annual bracket preview exercise, well, sheesh, at least it isn’t that.

The early bracket reveal is, frankly, more tasteful in scope and execution. It’s a one-off deal, it includes just the top 16 seeds, and it is accompanied with the humility of caveats: This is just an exercise. This is our own practice for the real thing in a month. This is going to change, obviously. Accept it in the spirit in which it is intended.

It is always tempting to look at the bracket reveal as some wider statement of committee intent, of broad principles that will be applied moving forward. And sometimes you can squint between the lines and see those takeaways — or at least think you can.

To wit: This year, the committee swerved on the pre-reveal Bracket Matrix consensus, inserting Florida as the SEC’s third No. 1 seed — a surprise that set off a sudden mass bracketnik scramble in response. (Will Warren outlined the pre- and post-reveal bracket changes Monday. It’s all pretty funny and occasionally even shameless: 17 of 107 brackets had Florida as a No. 1 before Saturday; now all but one of them do.) It is not unreasonable to look at the committee’s approach to the Gators — as well as its bullish seeding of Kentucky as a No. 3 — and rightfully assume that it thinks the SEC, or at least the SEC’s best teams, are just as good as we’ve all been saying all season long.

It is likewise hard to ignore Kansas going from a consensus No. 3 seed to out of the top 16 after the committee (correctly, in our view) demoted it. It is also hard not try to divine what they’re seeing on KU’s team sheet — bad road performances? recency bias? pure “we don’t think this team looks good” eye test stuff? — that informed such a decision.

Those could be helpful tidbits. They could be clues, with underlying theses, reasons to peer deeper into the committee’s supposed rationale (as opposed to just ctrl-v-ing your bracket to the one you on TV). What don’t they like about Kansas’s team sheet? What other teams, particularly those around the bubble, might have similar conceptual problems?

They might be something! They might also be nothing.

Who knows what these folks will think of Florida come March? Who can say whether Kentucky will rise or fall on the s-curve in the next four weeks? Maybe the committee called its shot with KU, given what happened at Utah Saturday and then BYU Tuesday night, but the Jayhawks might also go on a late-season redemption run. Teams almost never wind up in their bracket preview spots come Selection Sunday, because of course they don’t, because there is always another month of season to play.

Rather than try to divine any meaningful animating preferences from a 16-team slice of an eventual 68-team bracket, we would encourage folks to acknowledge that the uncertainty is the point. This is what is good about the bracket preview exercise in the first place, especially relative to the football counterpart: fundamentally, it means nothing. It is designed to mean nothing. NCAA folks will happily tell you it mostly serves to let committee members go through the motions. The content is a bonus. They get to argue for and against teams, ensure those preferences fit within the bracketing principles the committee must attempt to abide by, and then reveal and sell them to the public — all before the whole world tunes in on Selection Sunday, when time and nerves are tight. It’s a rehearsal. There doesn’t need to be any logical throughline between now and March. The committee chair doesn’t need to do a teleconference every Monday justifying why X team moved into Y spot over Z. The committee gets to show back up in a month with new ideas, newly formed opinions, and a lot more time and seriousness with which to do their job.

After years of overanalyzing these things, we have gradually decided the best approach is to simply enjoy the brief bracket-related dopamine blip … while also refusing to care. The football people really want fans to care. They practically force you to care. Here, you don’t have to! Isn’t that better?

(And if a person who spends this much time writing Bubble Watch tells you not to care, congratulations: you really don’t have to care.)

The usual housekeeping:

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ACC

The funniest thing* about Virginia’s 80-62 loss to Duke Monday night — or the saddest, or both — is that the Cavaliers actually played pretty well on the offensive end. They weren’t amazing, to be sure. But barely anyone looks amazing against Duke’s defense; the Blue Devils are one of the most daunting opposing challenges in the sport. Virginia nonetheless managed 62 points in 61 trips and essentially matched (8-of-22) Duke (9-of-23 from 3) in production beyond the arc. In the abstract, at almost any point in the past 15 years, UVa fans would have taken that output, secure in the knowledge that Tony Bennett’s reliable pack-line scheme would keep them in the game.

Not now. In addition to being drab offensively, the Cavaliers rank 14th in the ACC in per-possession defense. It wasn’t long ago that UVa teams were capable of going toe-to-toe with even the best Duke outfits; even in the waning Bennett years elite defense could keep them competitive. Under Ron Sanchez, that floor has collapsed. Duke’s carefree romp in Charlottesville Monday was yet another reminder that a proud era — both for Virginia and in many ways for the ACC itself — is truly over. What comes next is anyone’s guess.

*Actually, check that: The funniest part was when official Roger Ayers ejected a white-haired fan in a sweater-turtleneck ensemble who looked like he needed to relieve his UVa hoops frustration with a soothing trip to Keswick Vineyards. People were high-fiving him on the way out. That was the funniest part.