Bubble Watch: Villanova won, but not really

What is the argument for them now?

It’s over/we’re so back

All along, the bubble case for Villanova has been pretty simple: You have to think this team is good in spite of what its record tells you, almost in spite of itself.

Yes, 18-14 is an ugly balance of wins and losses, and results-based metrics like strength of record and KPI and even that simple old chestnut RPI all detest Villanova's team sheet. But if you believed the Wildcats’ performances were better than their results, and believed you could detect this gap in their elevated performance metrics, you could talk yourself into them as a team that deserved to be in the tournament, that could maybe even make a run.

If you squinted hard enough, you could see Villanova on the front of the uniform, see a team with some of the old players from the old days, a team that sort of plays like the Villanova you remember, just worse, and maybe you could ignore everything else.

There is no squinting at it now. The performance against DePaul was blindingly bad. DePaul, 0-20 in the Big East and 24-point underdogs in advance of Wednesday's game, can be located all the way to the very far right side of Villanova's team sheet, in Quadrant 4, where they ranked 322nd in the NET coming in:

Dude. Gross.

(You have to feel terrible for DePaul’s players, too, who played really hard for a dream that should have died like two months ago. True sportsmen.)

In beating this team by just one point, Villanova fell from 33 to 40 in the NET. This is a precipitous drop for this time of year, when so much data is already in the model. Maybe the NET number doesn’t matter to the committee, nor a KenPom decline from 29th to 35th, but then you have to ask yourself what exactly about Villanova’s resume it is that you like. The win over UNC? Sure. But what else?

Predictive metrics — performance beyond the sheer binary of what the score said when the 40 minutes of basketball were over — was the only viable argument for Villanova. The Wildcats forfeited that argument Wednesday.

What reason is there to put Villanova in the field now? Unless they suddenly storm past Marquette and Creighton Thursday and Friday — and nothing about Villanova's season, even their strong-ish finish down the stretch, suggests they will do so — there is very little case to be made for this team to even be considered for an at-large bid. What's the fall back here? The eye test? For a team that played one of the most atrocious games of basketball any winning team has played all season? That needed until the final possession, and a contested Justin Moore hero 3, to see off DePaul?

There is a lot of talk about surviving and advancing these days. Villanova advanced, but did it survive? It won the game. But in every other way, it lost.

Automatic bids from non-Bubble Watch (one-bid) leagues: 21
Locks: 33
Should be in: 6
Work to do: 13
Waiting game: 1

Housekeeping:

• This is a partial refresh — every section header is updated, as is every team who played (and then some) though some teams who weren’t in action or whose circumstances didn’t change Wednesday won’t have much new information. Just a heads up. Thursday’s file will, by necessity, include updates for everyone.

• Some email providers impose limits on email length. This is a long file, so if your email cuts off, be sure to click through to the site itself to read it all.

• 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 (except for the Villanova numbers above). Records are always up to date. Thanks as ever to Warren Nolan for his immensely helpful site.

ACC

He would never admit it, but it's safe to assume Syracuse coach Adrian Autry, in his first year attempting to replace Jim Boeheim, would have very much preferred the latter not viciously insult all of the players, staff, coaches and entire history of the NC State men's basketball program during a live ESPN broadcast Wednesday evening, one day before NC State was scheduled to play Syracuse. But that's exactly what Boeheim did, hijacking Cory Alexander's innocuous question about an NC State player's 3-goggles celebration to wonder why NC State should even be celebrating anything at all.

What happened next? NC State played Syracuse, and beat Syracuse, and to be more precise beat Syracuse 83-65, a margin that sounds bad but was actually much worse throughout large stretches of the second half. Syracuse's odds of making the tournament were always long, but they were at least in with a chance, and NC State's post-Boeheim-snark dominance ended their season more emphatically than anyone might have imagined.

Elsewhere, Kenny Payne got fired. Shock, right? We recommend Mike Rutherford’s angry, exasperated eulogy. We'll dig in to the Louisville job at some point, when there is less of a deluge of hoops to cover, but needless to say this is the most pivotal hire at the school since Denny Crum retired, and Josh Heird literally can't afford to get it wrong.

Also: Clemson should thank Villanova for soaking up all the negative attention at around 11:30 p.m. ET Wednesday night, because that was right around the same time the Tigers finished getting run by Boston College. BC is vastly better than DePaul, but still.

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

Wake Forest (20-12, 11-9; NET: 38, SOR: 63): Some credit for Notre Dame (and, by extension, Wake): Notre Dame got a lot better as the season went on. Micah Shrewsberry's first season was hardly smooth sailing, and the bad moments were particularly bad, but the Irish won five of their last eight, beat Clemson and Wake at home, very nearly swept Virginia Tech, and ended up ranked 37th in adjusted defensive efficiency. This surely bodes well for next season, assuming some level of roster continuity and offensive improvement but in any case a Wake team that could not remotely afford a loss handled the challenge and set up Thursday's bubble-off with Pitt.