Bubble Watch: Recency bias

Wisconsin's decline, Wazzu's rise, Pitt's arrival, Wake's stagnation, new locks and tons more

Photo credit: USA Today Sports

On Saturday morning, not long after the selection committee revealed its current top 16 seeds from its annual mock bracket exercise in Indianapolis, as (from what we could tell) most people responded to a pretty predictable top 16 list with a quiet head nod and a “yep, that looks about right,” CBS’s Matt Norlander received this reply from Twitter user Adam DeMamp:

Wisconsin being on there is wild. They’ve been ass lately

This comment made us laugh — not just because it’s profane, but because it is actually trenchant. It hints at the core tension so many fans feel in the NCAA Tournament bracketing process: the idea that the committee should do more to account for how well a team is playing right now.

Wisconsin is a perfect example. After a brilliant 16-4 start, the Badgers are 1-5 in their last six games, with losses to Michigan, Rutgers and Iowa (and an uninspiring home win over Ohio State). They have been as Adam described.

And yet people familiar with the bracketing process should not have been surprised at all with Wisconsin’s narrow inclusion. The underlying logic is the same reason team sheets look like this:

The format is not just not chronological, it is actively hostile to chronology. Unless you want to spend time hunting through the randomly assorted dates, getting any sense of a team’s recent results involves opening up a schedule page alongside the team sheet, just so you can see a different view. Why? Because the dates aren’t supposed to matter! Results are organized across qualitative categories regardless of their place in time. For more than a decade, the NCAA has insisted that every game counts equally, that there is no formal consideration of recent performance, that results in November matter just as much as ones in February. Even if that isn’t always strictly true — we’d bet it gets brought up in close arguments occasionally — the idea is now an old and accepted one. It informs the process so deeply that it aligns with how team sheets are internally sorted.

Viewed like this, Wisconsin still has a pretty good team sheet.

This drives some people nuts. And we get it! Why wouldn’t you rank the hot team, the team peaking at the right time, over the one that played its best ball in December? But beyond limiting your sample size — why take a five or 10 game sample late in the season when you have 30 games of data to interpret? — it is because the sport has to matter in November and December for coaches, players, and fans to take those games seriously too. The sport’s growth and relevance beyond three months (or, for some people, three weeks) depends on it.

If the trade off is that teams occasionally enter the NCAA Tournament in more of a slump than their seeding indicates — if they enter the tournament having recently been, well, you know: bad — so be it.

Housekeeping:

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• 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.

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ACC

For anyone who missed it, it’s worth watching this compilation of highlights from Jared McCain’s 35-point explosion at Florida State Saturday, when McCain shot 8-of-11 from 3 (!!!) and powered Duke to a 76-67 win.

It was McCain’s best game as a Duke player, obviously, but beyond the output — he probably isn’t going to make eight 3s in another game this season — it was also the first time we’ve looked at him and thought we were watching an actual future pro rather than a talented but vaguely ranked prospect. That shot mechanic is too pure. It looks a bit quicker than it was earlier in the year, too, while McCain’s movement is also much quicker and more decisive; he is making choices and then getting to spots faster. He looks comfortable, aggressive, fully settled in.

This is a big deal for Duke, which has seemingly always needed Kyle Filipowski to be excellent and Jeremy Roach to be the clear No. 2, even in this year’s gradually improved offensive setup. McCain has the talent to actually lead the team offensively, to relieve those other guys and provide more impetus and perimeter balance, and if he does an already good Blue Devils team might even be scary.

Locks: North Carolina, Duke
Should be in: Clemson, Virginia
Work to do: Wake Forest, Pittsburgh

Clemson (17-8, 7-7; NET: 27, SOR: 27): We were planning on locking Clemson this week, but then the Tigers lost at home to NC State. Not a huge deal on its own, but if Clemson lost out — and remember this is a team that lost four of five in 13 days in January, including a home loss to Georgia Tech — it would be 17-14 overall 7-13 in the ACC with two losses to Georgia Tech (where Clemson travels Wednesday), home losses to FSU and Syracuse, a road loss to Notre Dame, you name it. Is any of that going to happen? Probably not. But Clemson’s inconsistency makes us uncomfortable.