Bubble Watch: The Return
The Internet's longest, least sane college basketball column is back
Bubble Watch turns two today.
Of course that’s not actually true: It has existed, in various forms and at various outlets, for more than 15 years — and that’s just this Bubble Watch, by this particular author, in a world of many. But Bubble Watch here, at Buzzer, written entirely for you guys? That’s still a new thing. So we’re calling it: Two years old today.
We have other milestones to celebrate: Last week, Buzzer won its first US Basketball Writers Association award, first place for a column about Bob Knight and fatherhood:
So that’s fun! (Note: Column itself might not be super fun.) Also fun: Getting to the point of a college basketball season where it’s time to start really drilling down on these teams. So many teams! What are they all doing? What are they up to?
Are we going to attempt to figure out everyone’s chances of making the NCAA Tournament? Yes, sure. Are we going to have an anachronistically packaged reason to write about every semi-important team in the sport? Definitely. Are we going to celebrate the breadth of a sport in its most competitively healthy place ever? Yes! Are we going to go off on weird tangents and do dumb recurring jokes that may only interest/entertain us? Also that!
Such is the eternal promise of Bubble Watch. The home fires are still burning.
A couple of important notes:
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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 just think we should consider a team not on the page, 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.
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ACC
Who’s ready for more ACC discourse?! Nobody, it turns out.
For years, as the depth and quality of the Atlantic Coast Conference has glaringly dwindled, the league’s fans have aggressively pushed back against the narrative. Forget your dumb efficiency numbers! Forget the NET! Look how the league (over-)performs in March! This is the ACC you’re talking about, one of the most decorated conferences in the history of the sport; show some damn respect! It has been hard, as a writer, to balance the need to be straightforward about the league’s decline without making it seem like you’re hammering the point just to make ACC fans mad. Last fall, in the absence of much evidence for the notion, we prayed the league would be great again in 2024-25, if only because we dreaded another year of arguing about the ACC.
The league is bad again. Worse than ever, maybe. But a funny thing has happened this time around: No one seems to care. Compared to previous years, ACC diehards and regional media types seem to have dropped any pretense of defending the ACC as a whole; we haven’t noticed any of the “here’s how the Big 12 cheats the NET to defraud the masses” stuff that was emanating from ACC territory last winter. The 2023-24 ACC ranked fifth in KenPom.com’s adjusted efficiency margin rankings; so does this one, but with a significantly worse average NetRtg margin, +9.87. (Down from last year’s +13.02, and just a smidge higher than 2022-23’s +8.58, when the ACC ranked seventh among all conferences). The 2024-25 SEC’s is +21.75.
At a certain point, with numbers like these, it becomes hard to sell argument that your league is actually underrated. It’s also just exhausting. Attrition is inevitable. It’s been years of this now; what once felt like a brief blip, an outlier of history, now looks like the new reality. And with the ACC adding SMU, Stanford and Cal in the offseason, you could forgive the old vanguard for wondering what, exactly, they’re even defending anymore.
Anyway: Duke is extremely good (pesky NC State Monday night notwithstanding). So there’s that! Right, guys?
Lock: Duke
Should be in: Louisville, Clemson
Work to do: Pittsburgh, North Carolina, SMU, Wake Forest
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