We’re in the middle of the month of February, but we’re beginning what is essentially “Bubble Month” in college basketball. We’re just under four weeks from Selection Sunday. In these coming weeks, the bubble will expand and contract and, ultimately, get whittled down to a few teams by March 15 at 6 p.m. Eastern time, when the NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Committee reveals its bracket for the 2015 NCAA Tournament.
It’s a fun time of year, but with pleasure comes some responsibility. Be ready to debate bracketologists and pundits with your own sets of facts — there’s nothing wrong with that — but keep in mind some pointers about NCAA selection. If you think your team is a shoo-in for inclusion or is doomed to exclusion, you might be surprised by what’s just around the bend.
Here are five handy tips for handling “Bubble Month,” especially the frenzied sprint to the finish line in early March:
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5 – THERE ARE FOUR WEEKS LEFT!!!!!!!
This is the February-specific item on this list. In March, yes, time and opportunities become conspicuously limited, but right now, we still have four weeks of basketball (and basketball results) in front of us before the release of the brackets. Power-conference teams have, in several cases, six conference games left before the league tournaments begin. That’s a lot of space in which to make or break a resume.
It’s true that some six-game stretches are tougher than others, which means that Team A has a harder climb but also an easier chance to play its way into the field with quality wins. Team B, on the other hand, has an easier chance of going 5-1 but must indeed do so in order to feel comfortable on Selection Sunday.
Yes, if your team has just lost two games or three out of four (Stanford, cough, hack, wheeze…), you know your team has work to do, but it’s not as though your team’s a goner at this point. If, in the next two weeks, a cliff dive unfolds, okay, your team’s toasted. If your team wins four in a row and beats a top-15 RPI opponent, yes, you’re in excellent shape. If your team performs in between those extremes, it’s going to depend a lot on how other teams fare. Which brings us to our next point:
4 – CONFERENCE TOURNAMENTS ARE LIKE A BOX OF CHOCOLATES…
This is obviously a March-specific portion of “Bubble Month.”
Yes, you never know what you’re going to get in a conference tournament. The way a conference tournament bracket positions your team has a lot to say about its bubble fortunes.
Here’s one example: One bubble team in Conference D gets a low-RPI opponent in the first round, the kind of game that — if lost — is a killer if you’re right on the fence in terms of NCAA tournament inclusion. On the other hand, if you get past that “bad loss avoidance” trap, the quarterfinal is a game against the top seed in the conference tournament, a team in the top 10 of the RPI. A win there would be tough, but it’s what a team on the wrong side of the bubble wants in a league tournament: The chance to play its way onto the right side of the bubble and into a First Four slot.
Here’s another example: Let’s say you wind up as the 6 seed in your conference tournament. You’re slightly on the good side of the bubble, but you know you have to beat the 11 seed in the first round of your conference tournament to feel safe.
Well, the 11 seed just happens to be your nemesis, a team that has performed poorly in general — maybe because of a key injury, maybe because of a three-week slump it is beginning to emerge from — but knows how to beat you. That’s an awful situation for a team that might be one notch above the “last four in” on Conference Tournament Thursday… but needs that one first-round victory to lock up a bid on Sunday, three days later.
We don’t know how conference tournament brackets are going to fall, and they have a role to play in shaping the final few bubble battles of every college basketball campaign. If your team doesn’t firmly play its way in or out of the field before the conference tourneys begin, this becomes a big issue. Patience is required for teams that don’t go 5-0 (or 0-5) in the next three weeks.
3 – THE COMMITTEE HAS TO FIND 68 TEAMS, AND THEY’RE MOVING IN DIFFERENT DIRECTIONS
This is something you have to keep in mind. Your resume might seem fairly good, but if the rest of the at-large pool has X number of teams that own a better resume, you’re out. Conversely, if you think your team is headed for the NIT, but several other bubble teams endure worse losses in a week’s time, you will either head to Dayton or get direct entry into the bracket as a 12 seed.
The bubble might be weak enough to get your team in, even with less-than-spectacular results. Think of North Carolina State last season. If your team isn’t collapsing or soaring — in other words, if it’s remaining squarely on the bubble with each passing week — compare it to other bubble teams. Be honest, but do compare. You might be pleasantly surprised by what you find.
2 – GET PAST POLL RANKINGS, OVERALL RECORDS, AND PLACEMENTS IN CONFERENCES — THE SOONER THE BETTER
Every year, there are always a few handfuls of fans who cite poll rankings, (especially) numbers of wins, and (most especially) placements in conferences as reasons for NCAA tournament inclusion.
Please know this: Those are not reasons for inclusion — it’s not my decision, though; it’s the Selection Committee’s decision. The basic components of a tournament resume are win-loss records against various sections of the RPI; road- and neutral-court records; and overall strength of schedule, including the discretionary (non-conference) part of the slate. The committee will look for high-end wins and bad losses amidst those other categories. Some teams will prosper simply because they never picked up a bad loss. A few more teams get in the field because their one or two bad losses were exceeded by three or four quality wins and a strength of schedule robust enough to carry the full portfolio.
If wins or conference placements were the primary bases for tournament inclusion, 17-6 Davidson in the Atlantic 10 would be ahead of 15-11 N.C. State in the ACC, but that’s not the case… nor should it be. N.C. State has wins over Duke and Louisville, and will improve its place in the pecking order as long as it stops losing games it should win. Davidson doesn’t have the high-end wins to counter what NCSU can offer.
Saint Mary’s is 19-6 overall and 11-3 in the West Coast Conference, good enough for second place. Yet, no one would put SMC anywhere near Baylor, which is 18-7 and tied for sixth in the Big 12 with a 6-6 league mark. Baylor has played and beaten quality teams and will probably wear home whites in the NCAA first round as a higher-seeded team. Saint Mary’s has work to do just to make the NCAA tournament field.
Poll rankings? SMU was ranked in the top 25 entering its conference tournament last year. It lost in the quarterfinals to Houston, and did not make the NCAAs. Rankings don’t matter — it’s why college basketball is so great.
1 – SURPRISING AUTOMATIC BIDS
It happens every year: A few teams — think of Providence last year in the Big East — swoop in and surprisingly snare an automatic bid to take an at-large spot away from a bubble team. Just two or three shocks in this realm of Championship Fortnight redraw the bubble boundaries. This is one more reason to step back and realize that the bubble isn’t nearly as defined as it first appears.
Allow the season to play out.
Hmmm… that sounds a lot like college football.
That doesn’t make the advice less important, though.
Happy Bubble Month to you and your favorite team.