Bubble Watch: The hot hand

Remember: We know nothing

As longtime readers know, we have generally avoided sports betting, the culture around it, and the broader discussion thereof. It’s just never really been our thing. Fantasy football? Sure. Bracket pools, obviously. But grinding point spreads? Doing picks for readers? Telling people to follow or fade? Eh. No judgement, but never totally got the appeal.

This extends to personal life. We’ll goof around with friends doing group parlays on a college football Saturday, sure, but anything serious? Predicting game outcomes with conviction? Spending real money on a betting app? No thanks. We have always gently brushed back buddies who ask for picks or acquaintances who want bracket tips, and been occasionally flabbergasted when we see their account balances. Yes, we watch a lot of college basketball. No, that does not mean we know anything. We know nothing! We’re always wrong! The NCAA Tournament specifically, and college basketball generally, is not a thing you should try to figure out. Your bracket will look awful. You will look dumb. Don’t put that evil on us.

But recently we fell off the wagon. We felt particularly good about a few games last week, almost all of which pertained to the SEC, beginning with Arkansas at Auburn Feb. 19. (True story: Arkansas plays well pretty much all the time now.) Saturday, we liked Tennessee at Texas A&M and the prospect of Duke stomping Illinois well beyond the +9.5 pregame spread. Check and check. Houston at Texas Tech Monday night? Another seemingly obvious winner. Check, check, check.

The group chat was ecstatic. The vibes were alluring. The hand was hot.

And so despite not having particularly strong feelings about anything as we sat down to write Bubble Watch Tuesday night, we decided to — famous last words — let it ride. Florida (-6.5) at Georgia. Mississippi State (+8.5) at Alabama. Woof. One friend told us we had fallen out of our flow state. Another responded with a gif from Mighty Ducks 2: You lost it for me.

This is pretty much the exact experience we have every time we go to a casino. Win some hands: hey, this is kind of fun. Lose literally one: immediately revert to revulsion. It’s why we quit golf. The enjoyment of the good shots wasn’t worth either the agony of the bad ones (and there were many more bad ones) or the money spent to put all those large divots in nice courses.

Except with college basketball it’s far worse. Even though we have always acknowledged that we don’t know enough about anything, let alone basketball, to reliably win money gambling on it — and very few people seem to? — every failed bet feels like a rebuke. Because the little secret is that you don’t actually think you know nothing. That’s self-effacing. It’s a copout. It’s ego in disguise. You do think you know something about a thing, at least enough to write semi-insightfully about it, and then you wager (literally) a few bucks on it and get it wrong and feel like the biggest fraud on the planet, even if you just spent the previous few days getting basically everything else right.

Why bring this up? A couple of thoughts:

1. We have gained a minor newfound respect for people who do this sort of thing for a job. Not just professional gamblers — though, hey, if you can make a living gambling, seems hard, good for you — but for media people who have to, or even want to, leverage their purported mastery of the future to entertain consumers. We have sincere reservations about the reliance of sports media on gambling money these days, the pervasiveness of gambling on every sports broadcast, and the damaging penetration it seems to have made into the lives of young American men. (According to a 2024 Fairleigh Dickinson study, 10 percent of young men are “problem gamblers.” Seems extremely bad.) Way down that list would be that it’s hard to make it in media now if you’re not willing to do super hot takes or constantly pick spreads. Some are forced into the role. (We even got pressed into duty one year at The Athletic. It didn’t go well.) But set aside skill: Folks who do this stuff willingly, even enthusiastically, have an admirable apathy to being publicly, provably wrong.

2. We are thrillingly close to none of this stuff making any sense at all. There is something in the alchemy of the NCAA Tournament, some collective emotional shroud, that foments wildness. We truly believe this. Regular season upsets happen all the time, sure. But you can spend five months getting to know teams and coaches intimately and by February at least feel like you can recognize patterns and loosely predict outcomes; to us, anyway, this feels like the best time to gamble on college hoops, if that’s something you’re remotely interested in doing. (Really smart people probably think it’s the second week of November, or something, and maybe they’re right.) A month from now, all of that will be gone. NC State might be on their way to the Final Four after winning five games in the ACC Tournament. Seriously: Who knows?

The best thing about the NCAA Tournament is also, to some extent, the best thing about college basketball: The answer is no one. No one truly knows. You can guess, and you may even get a few things right. But you’ll almost always be mostly wrong.

That’s the fun part about this sport. That’s the bit worth chasing.

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ACC

And … that’s going to do it for Pitt. What a mess. We’ve referenced it all season, how promising Pitt’s start was: An 86-62 win over West Virginia. Big margins against good mid-majors in buy games. A narrow loss to Wisconsin at the Greenbrier. A win at Ohio State. And metrics — oh, the metrics! On Dec. 4, as they traveled to Starkville for the ACC-SEC Challenge, the Panthers ranked 12th in the country in adjusted efficiency, up from 37th when they began the season exactly one month earlier.

They lost by 33 there, and so came the beginning of the end. Since Jan. 7, when they fell by 29 at Duke, Jeff Capel’s team is 4-10. They lost to Virginia by 16 at the Pete. They lost at Notre Dame. They lost at Florida State. On Tuesday night, they lost at home to Georgia Tech. What once looked like one of the ACC’s promising highlights — in a year when the ACC really needed a team like Pitt (or Syracuse, or Virginia, or Florida State, or anybody with a damn pulse) to help build out the top third of a decaying league — has devolved into one of its biggest disappointments. They’re off the page.

Lock: Duke
Should be in: Clemson, Louisville
Work to do: SMU, North Carolina, Wake Forest