Bubble Watch: The ACC trolling has gone too far

The Atlantic Coast Conference is not a two-bid league (but the Pac-12 might be)

Straight in today, except to say a quick thank you to Justin Williams and the crew over at The Athletic for the shout-out at the start of his column today. Justin is doing a revised Bubble Watch for our old site; he didn’t need to send people over here, but it was super nice of him to do so.

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Housekeeping!

• The distinctions between “should be in” and “work to do” are still pretty fuzzy this time of year. Don’t freak out about it.

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• No, we’re not listing the math this week. Next week, maybe. Rest assured commenter Ben will have us covered below the line. 🤝

ACC

ACC fans are convinced the world is out to get their league. Malicious media are intent on belittling a proud conference, denigrating its culture and its traditions. Or, at the very least, media have realized that they can get a response by saying something negative about the ACC — whether or not it’s true.

These are the sorts of spurious impressions we here at Bubble Watch Inc. have been working hard to dispel for several years now. In fact, the ACC has had a rough patch in recent seasons, for a variety of well-documented reasons. No, it’s not just the NET that “dislikes” the league; the ACC’s minor decline in the past five seasons is visible in its average KenPom rankings, too, even if teams at the top of the league (Virginia in 2019, UNC and Duke more broadly) have continued to excel. Generally speaking, we think ACC fans have gotten a bit too defensive about their conference vis a vis the NCAA Tournament the last couple of years, have started overrating the value of a win at Pittsburgh, or whatever, for reasons that aren’t “the media’s” fault, and have started taking it out on the people who are trying, in good faith, to deliver some weekly home truths. (Like, you know, us.)

Or, well, we did think that, right up to the moment Jon Rothstein unloaded this masterpiece Saturday:

Never has a tweet been more finely tuned to piss ACC fans off. You have to respect it, frankly; it is perfect. It was also obviously, if not purposefully, wrong.