Bubble Watch: Worst. Bubble. Ever.

Mediocrity is chaos, and chaos is more fun

What happened to the bubble on the final weekend of the 2025-26 regular season can be summarized in exactly two words:

Everyone lost.

We could end the newsletter right there. The defeats were overwhelming: SMU, Virginia Tech, Cal, Cincinnati, Seton Hall, Indiana, Auburn, Missouri and New Mexico all stepped on rakes. They accounted for a significant percentage of teams listed in the “work to do” category in last Friday’s column. Some wobbly-ish “should be in” teams got in on the fun, too: UCF, NC State, Texas, and even Saint Louis, our beautiful Billiken boys, all lost.

There were a couple of winners in there, too, of course (Miami, VCU, Ohio State by a million). But mostly it was a bloodbath. Discourse rapidly ensued. As Matt Norlander, a staunch critic of NCAA Tournament expansion, noted, it feels awfully hard to justify expanding the field after an “appalling” weekend like that. The response was reasonable: Don’t people say this every year? Yeah, kind of! The bubble basically always feels like it’s a mess, because it is, because that’s what makes it the bubble. How do you know this one is especially bad?

Thankfully, Evan Miyakawa had the numbers handy:

The same gap was evident between Evan’s average top 30 team and the average bubble team. “This year’s bubble is objectively the worst we’ve ever had,” Evan concluded — with the past two seasons not far behind.

(Interestingly, Evan also found the gap between bubble teams and the average Division I team is also wider than ever. That reinforces the notion that the resource at the very top of the sport, spread downward among mediocre power conference teams, is drinking the rest of Division I’s milkshake at roughly the rate we all assumed it would, even if the effects are not traditionally distributed: Nebraska and Vanderbilt are having amazing seasons, after all.)

This largely matches our experience. How did Cal stick around so long? Indiana is soft. SMU can’t guard. Stanford wasn’t on the page last week; a win at NC State immediately puts them back in the mix. Very few of these teams feel like they’re surging down the stretch. None of them feel like they’ve figured something out, or are getting healthy, or might just get hot. Most feel destined for a quiet, painless first round (or First Four) exit. Can you hold still, please, sir? The numbers make sense.

The good news? Much of the fun of Bubble Watch is that this exact nonsense is priced in. It’s the bubble! These teams are, by definition, not that good! They have glaring tactical flaws or played weird schedules or spent the past month shooting themselves in the foot. One of them is 16-15, has won two games since Jan. 28, and the coach’s dad has floated the argument they deserve to get in over a team that is literally undefeated. This what it’s all about, baby! The pure, uncut stuff. This is why we get up in the morning.

All of the team sheet shreding should make for a fascinating Champ Week, too. No, seriously: Stanford is back. We’re monitoring Oklahoma! West Virginia might get involved! Chaos is Bubble Watch’s bread and butter. And this year still holds the potential for some of the most chaotic, glorious, bubbliest screwball comedy the sport can produce. It’s exactly why we’re here.

Housekeeping and miscellany:

• As is tradition, we’ll be sending out updated Bubble Watch files throughout Champ Week beginning Thursday morning. (We’ll update this page after Tuesday night’s results, but it’s just a couple of games, and we’re not going spam 8,000 people with a couple hundred new words about SMU and Virginia Tech.) We’ll be around in the comments section, but we’d also encourage everyone to pop over to the live chat, which have been a blast all season.

• 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 WAB 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.

• We wrote all of this, by hand, as nature intended. It’s a labor of love. If you would like to support its existence (and be able to comment, and join the live chats, and — at the founding tier — do a regular Zoom call with us to talk hoops) please consider a paid subscription today. Thanks!

ACC

One consequence of all those losses: Clemson is now a lock. The Tigers could have earned the distinction much earlier; they started 20-4 before a four-game losing streak that exposed some of the underlying brittleness of their resume. That’s still a thing: 36th in NET, 32nd in WAB, 38th at KenPom, with a weird habit of losing to mediocre opposition at home. But the actual bubble is much worse. Whatever happens in the ACC tournament — and they have a chance against North Carolina a — they’re getting in.

Lock: Duke, Virginia, Louisville, North Carolina, Miami, Clemson
Work to do: NC State, SMU
Waiting game: Virginia Tech, Stanford