Bubble Watch: Penn State in the NCAA Tournament? Book it. (2024)

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It’s all over but the crying.

This is the state of play on the bubble as of late Saturday night and early Sunday morning: We’re, um, just about done here. This is not normally how it goes! After a very entertaining, and sporadically bubble-impactful, first few days of Champ Week, things whittled down somewhat remarkably on Saturday, and then everything went quiet. (Saturday was also just a total dud; very few of the games, bubble or otherwise, were good.)

Vanderbilt lost, which kept the cut line in roughly the same order as when the day began. Penn State consolidated its position (and earned a lock). Ohio State, having already won three games in the Big Ten tournament, looked like it might steal a bid; it ran out of gas against Purdue. UAB, the most immediate, direct chance for a bid thief still in operation, got blown out by Florida Atlantic, Conference USA’s No. 1 seed. Houston and Memphis advanced from the American semifinals. Conference tournaments in general were unusually, almost unbelievably chalky. For the first time in forever — and in this crazy, topsy-turvy 2023 season, of all times — the dimensions of the bubble didn’t meaningfully change late, let alone shrink.

And so, as Selection Sunday begins, the bubble you see below is where things will remain until the selection show itself begins Sunday evening. We feel like we have a pretty good understanding of where everyone stands going in, maybe more so than usual, even if there’s no legislating for that one random team the committee throws in seemingly every year. It will happen. To Vanderbilt, Nevada and Oklahoma State fans — hell, to Clemson fans, why not — don’t give up just yet. This bubble is forgiving. There are no lost causes here. (Except North Carolina.)

Point is, our work here is basically done. The committee won’t have to consider late developments Sunday afternoon, or worry about an at-large spot disappearing. What you see is what you get. All that’s left is to find out who will eagerly pack their bags for a trip to Dayton and who will spend Sunday night upset.

Automatic bids from non-Bubble Watch (i.e. one-bid) leagues:23
Locks: 34
Should be in: 3
Waiting game: 14

Housekeeping:

• Bubble Watch will now update live from here until Selection Sunday — as soon as games finish, we’ll have fresh Bubble Watch for you all week, until the field is revealed Sunday. Bookmark this page and check back often. (We’ll also be in the comments section back and forth where we can all week.)

• Locks are generally reserved for teams that have zero chance of missing out on the NCAA Tournament, even if they were to lose every game the rest of the way; a lock should mean what it says on the tin. “Should be in” means your team would be pretty safely in if the field was selected today; “work to do” means nothing is guaranteed.

• NET and schedule numbers are current as they update every morning. Records are up to the minute.

• As always, a million thanks to Warren Nolan for his amazing website. Use it to see the team sheets we work from and get a better visual sense of this information for yourself.

ACC

Ssshhh. Rest now, North Carolina. Your struggle is over. We’ll always remember these UNC players (plus Brady Manek) for their wild, big-hearted run last year, for the way they struck two of the greatest rivalry blows in college hoops history in the matter of a few weeks, for the way they ended up a few buckets short of a remarkable national title. But the dark second chapter is now over, too, and in that one North Carolina went from March darlings to — at least statistically — the most disappointing team in college basketball history, the first AP preseason No. 1 to miss the NCAA Tournament. Which, yes, is what’s going to happen. Teams with one Quadrant 1 win (especially teams with this many Quadrant 1 opportunities!) don’t get at-large bids. It doesn’t happen. That’s basically the end of the discussion then and there.

For weeks, we’ve been telling people this, as well as hammering home that the idea — espoused at times not just by Twitter cynics but by the highest-profile bracketologist in the land — that UNC would get special committee dispensation because of last year’s run, or the program’s brand, was nonsense. No, they wouldn’t. They needed to win games and get on the right side of the bubble like everybody else, and if they didn’t the committee wasn’t going to put them in the field. It’s not like the players were figuring it out on the fly, or even showing all that much fight. They were lifeless in Chapel Hill against Duke last weekend; they were lifeless against Virginia Thursday night. Now it’s not even a discussion, not even a minor argument some committee member might try out to see if it will land. UNC has no case. For the first time all season, they are no longer on the page. They must be relieved. We know we are.

The Athletic has live coverage of the ACC Tournament with analysis, scores and bracket news

Automatic qualifier: Duke
Locks: Virginia, Miami
Waiting game: Pittsburgh, NC State, Clemson

Clemson (23-10, 14-6; NET: 57, SOS: 102) Last night, Clemson’s blurb was like 400 words, a whole section unto itself, about how just because a broadcaster makes an emphatic statement about a team definitely being in the tournament doesn’t make it true. Let’s just say there was a bit less of that happening Friday night against Virginia. (If you want to see some crazy broadcaster bracketing, go see the Vanderbilt blurb. Too funny.) Having blown out NC State Thursday, Clemson was in turn blown out, a non-entity on a night when they still — despite what anyone said 24 hours before — needed a win to make up for the very glaring flaws on their team sheet. Clemson’s nonconference schedule was atrocious; the two losses in Quadrant 3 and Quadrant 4 are something most bubble teams don’t have, and all of this team’s good wins came in a soft ACC schedule (save Penn State, which looks like it will get in the field, but which the Tigers played at Littlejohn). Clemson needed to beat Virginia; without a win, or even a credible performance, the Tigers are almost certainly headed to the NIT.

Pittsburgh (22-11, 14-6; NET: 67, SOS: 89): Well … that was a letdown. Pittsburgh handled business against Georgia Tech Wednesday, after which we moved them up to “should be in” territory. Maybe the Panthers would be a double-digit seed and reasonably close to the cut line in the end, but we didn’t think they would be at any real risk of missing the field, especially if they played well against — or even just straight-up beat — Duke Thursday afternoon. They did not. They did not come close. They lost 96-69. They were never, ever in the game, not even remotely, and the performance was bad enough (and it’s worth remembering that Duke isn’t some vintage behemoth this season, but a likely No. 6-7 seed) that it will almost certainly knock Pitt’s already questionable metrics down into even shakier territory overnight. We’ll have to wait until Friday morning to see the updated NET numbers, obviously, but the Panthers fell from 66th to 77th in KenPom after the Duke defeat. That’s just … well, yeah. Yikes.

(Update from Friday morning: Pitt fell from 56th in the NET to … drum roll, please … 67th. Ouch. Not great, Bob!)

The Panthers are now 4-4 in Quadrant 1 and 3-5 in Quadrant 2, with a loss at Notre Dame, a loss at home to Florida State, and very average team sheet metrics. For a while now, their fans have been telling us they’re definitely going to the tournament, and they may still be right. But would it surprise anyone if they ended up in the First Four? Things are less certain here than they’ve been in months, and rather than celebrating their program’s resurrection season, Pitt fans will spend all weekend sweating it out.

NC State (23-10, 12-8; NET: 45, SOS: 77): Our sage colleague Brian Bennett made an important observation during N.C. State’s biweekly blowout loss to Clemson: Are we sure the Wolfpack are really going to make it? We were as on board as the next person after Wednesday’s rout of Virginia Tech, but then Kevin Keatts’ team turned around and laid a massive stinker against Clemson again — and all of a sudden you look at the team sheet and wonder if maybe there’s not much here. NC State has won one Quad 1 game, at home, against Duke. It is 7-4 against Quadrant 2. The rest of its wins — and, to be fair, zero “bad” losses, except maybe a loss at Syracuse, which was bad at basketball this year — come in Quadrants 3 and 4, 15 in total. The nonconference schedule ranks 245th. The metrics remain middling. The whole “don’t give teams a bid if they only have one Quadrant 1 win” thing could apply just as much to N.C. State as it does to Carolina, no? Should it not? Because those resumes aren’t actually that different.

Big 12

The 2022-23 Big 12 season formally ended Saturday night in Kansas City, and we would be remiss if we didn’t congratulate a) the entire league, for being guaranteed entertainment every couple of nights for the past two months, thank you 2023 Big 12, and b) Texas for its conference tournament title. Because, hey, remember when Texas’s season was supposed to be over? When the sudden, ugly departure of its head coach was supposed to spell the end of a promising campaign? The Longhorns refused to let the obvious narrative play out. The players came together, rededicated themselves, kept their heads down, followed interim head coach Rodney Terry, and look at them now. They just won a title; they went neck-and-neck with Kansas et al. in the most brutal league in the country; and they have a legitimate argument for a No. 1 NCAA Tournament seed, whether or not they actually end up getting it. Is there anything this team could have done with its former coach that it didn’t go do anyway without him?

The Athletic has live coverage of the Big 12 Tournament with analysis, scores and bracket news

Automatic qualifier: Texas
Locks: Kansas, Baylor, Kansas State, TCU, Iowa State
Should be in: West Virginia
Waiting game: Oklahoma State

West Virginia (19-14, 7-11; NET: 25, SOS: 5): Our whole “West Virginia is just good, actually” take — now entering its fifth month of tepid existence — took a bit of a hit Thursday at the Big 12 tournament. Good teams tend not to lose to the same opponent three times in one season, though to be fair to West Virginia, it very nearly knocked off Kansas in Lawrence Feb. 25. A bucket or two there goes differently and West Virginia is locked as we speak. Alas, the Mountaineers lost, and they were routed by a Bill Self-less KU again in Kansas City Thursday, but their good work in a win over Texas Tech Wednesday night put them in “should be in” territory, where we think they’ll stay until Selection Sunday.

Oklahoma State (18-15, 8-10; NET: 43, SOS: 7): On the one hand, losing to Texas, even heavily, is hardly a shame. Texas is good. On the other hand, Oklahoma State kind of needed to win. The Cowboys are very much a choose-your-own-adventure sort of entity on the bubble; bracketologists who think the committee will heavily value all those very tough opponents OSU played in the Big 12 (and mostly lost to) will be more inclined to keep them in the bracket. Plenty of others will go with a different option. Here’s what we think: This may have been a historically brutal version of the Big 12, but Oklahoma State still has 15 losses. It also lost to UCF, Virginia Tech and Southern Illinois. Very few teams with 15 losses have ever received at-large bids. Is this Oklahoma State team convincing enough to become one of them?

We truly don’t know what the committee will make of this team, but we have our faint suspicions. Maybe Mike Boynton is a happy camper come Sunday, but we kind of expect the opposite.

Big East

God, the Big East tournament rules. It really is a cliche to say at this point; the Big East tournament has tremendous PR, the kind of PR you can only get when you stage your tournament in Madison Square Garden as a matter of tradition, but damn if it isn’t true. That thing just always rules.

The latest best example came mid-afternoon Thursday, when Providence and UConn met in the quarterfinals. In theory, this game didn’t matter. On our couch, we were hoping for Providence to put up a decent showing, because we’ve been getting gradually more nervous about having locked Providence back when they were 21-8 and hadn’t gotten blown out by Seton Hall in their own gym on the last Saturday of the season. Naturally, Providence didn’t show up. The Huskies, meanwhile, were in their finest early-season form, just comprehensively dominant, and as they flirted with a 30-point margin we began to worry a great deal for Providence — or, more precisely, for ourselves, and for what we would have to do about that suddenly soft resume being a lock.

And then some raw, uncut Big East tournament happened. For the first time in a few weeks, Providence awoke, engineering an extended 26-5 run that all but erased Connecticut’s deficit and sent the Garden into hysterics. Ed Cooley was marching around, urging his kids to press, running a 3-2 zone that UConn couldn’t figure out, conducting the whole symphony. Shots started falling. The arena went nuts. Providence eventually lost — impressively, Connecticut got off the mat and found its way down the stretch, which bodes well for the next few weeks — but the nature of the loss was one that made us feel a lot more comfortable about that PC lock. It was also incredibly fun.

The Athletic has live coverage of the Big East Tournament with analysis, scores and bracket news

Automatic qualifier: Marquette
Locks: Connecticut, Creighton, Xavier, Providence

Big Ten

The rest of the bubble can exhale: Ohio State is off the board. The Buckeyes’ run in the Big Ten tournament would have been a matter of much consternation to teams on the first-four-out/last-four-in cut line, and it was starting to look realistic. OSU, after all, had already knocked off Wisconsin, Iowa and Michigan State; it had the kind of rolling momentum teams who play early in league tournaments (or in Dayton next week) can build on from day to day. Maybe the Buckeyes would totally resurrect their bizarre season — when they started 10-3, lost 13 of their next 14, and then won five of their last six — with a Big Ten tournament title, and an at-large bid stolen.

Then they ran into Zach Edey. Very few people can guard Zach Edey, but it does help to have someone with at least some sort of size on your squad. Ohio State, bless them, did not. Edey had 32 points and 14 rebounds; Purdue cruised, and saved at least one bubble team’s skin.

Phew! Penn State led Indiana by 13 with a little over 90 seconds to play at the United Center Saturday, at which point the Hoosiers got into a diabolical full court press and Penn State’s wheels almost entirely came off. Indiana eventually cut the lead to one, Penn State made a pair of free throws, and Jalen Hood-Schifino’s would-be game-tying 3 hit the front of the rim. (Indiana was down three. It wasn’t the world’s best shot, but there was a part of us that thought, well, hey, at least it wasn’t a quick two.) Anyway, the Nittany Lions survived, and as such they are almost certain to play in the NCAA Tournament next week. Beating Indiana on a neutral floor gave Penn State its eighth Quadrant 1 win. In the past month they have thrillingly — and always with a huge amount of anxiety, never more so than Saturday — played themselves into the field. They’re a lock.

The Athletic has live coverage of the Big Ten Tournament with analysis, scores and bracket news

Locks: Purdue, Maryland, Indiana, Michigan State, Illinois, Iowa, Northwestern, Penn State
Waiting game: Rutgers, Michigan, Wisconsin

Rutgers (19-14, 10-10; NET: 40, SOS: 39): And now Rutgers will wait it out. The Scarlet Knights gave a good account of themselves in Chicago. Their win over Michigan Monday felt like a bubble playoff; at the very least, it almost certainly ended the 15-loss Wolverines’ hopes of landing an at-large bid come Sunday. Rutgers played well and pushed Purdue Friday, for whatever that’s worth. Will it ensure Rutgers will be in? If so, the margin is very slim. We would probably have Steve Pikiell’s team just above the cut line, en route to Dayton, reflecting a resume that includes a massive true road win at Purdue, 5-7 record in Quadrant 1, but also a terrible nonconference schedule (rank: 309) and somehow a 2-4 record against Quadrant 3 with losses to Seton Hall, Nebraska, Temple and Minnesota. (The “somehow,” here, is actually pretty simple: Often, Rutgers can not score the ball.) It’s going to be a nervy couple days in Piscataway.

Michigan (17-15, 11-9; NET: 58, SOS: 20): Michigan has reached the end of its winding, uneven road. Having begun its 2022-23 season 11-10, a late push into the field was always going to be unlikely. Michigan, to be fair, made a good go of it. The Wolverines performed like one of the best 20 teams in the country from Feb. 1 on; Hunter Dickinson played like one of the best big men in a sport full of them, Kobe Bufkin looked like a pro, and a much more cohesive structure formed around them. But when you give yourself so little margin for error, you can’t afford to slip up as many times as Juwan Howard’s team eventually did. They played great at Illinois and especially at Indiana in the last week of the season, but they needed the actual wins. And then when they did put up an inevitable stinker — when the non-Dickinson offense suddenly sputtered and halted for once late in the year — it came in a must-win moment Thursday at the Big Ten tournament, the exact spot where you can’t afford to make one field goal in the first 15 minutes of the second half. Michigan has 15 losses now, one of which came to Central Michigan. Simply put, that’s not a tournament team. We’ll leave them on the page for the moment, in case the bubble goes totally haywire, but we don’t think they’re in genuine contention anymore.

Wisconsin (17-14, 9-11; NET: 82, SOS: 13): In the end, Wisconsin was betrayed by its offense. This was true Wednesday evening at the United Center, when the Badgers fell 27 points behind an Ohio State team that eventually finished the game with 65 points in around 64 possessions. You can deduce the math from there; Wisconsin was so offensively nonexistent that even when it did make their run, and the Buckeyes stagnated, it wasn’t enough to get past a team that lost 13 of 14 from Jan. 5 to Feb. 23. But Wisconsin was betrayed by its offense all season. The Badgers finished 12th in the B1G in points per possession; they shot awful percentages from everywhere, never grabbed offensive rebounds, and never got to the free-throw line. The only thing they did was avoid turnovers (as is tradition), but that made them worse to watch; every possession felt interminable, another 30 seconds of wasted time.

That offensive inefficiency is what kept Wisconsin from edging itself into more viable bubble territory all along. After Wednesday’s performance, and considering the rest of this team sheet, we have a hard time imagining they’ll get into the field come Selection Sunday. We’ll keep them on the page — maybe everybody else on the bubble loses, too — but if the committee was watching Wednesday, they can’t have enjoyed what they saw.

Pac-12

On Thursday night, we wrote that Oregon was “not dead yet.” Allow us to correct that statement: Oregon is very dead. The Ducks got rolled by UCLA Friday, 75-56, and that will do it for Oregon’s nascent bubble hopes. Indeed, we never really bought into Oregon’s chances in the first place, even as it crept up mock brackets; we just didn’t see it. (Will Richardson being so average these past two seasons was the most significant clue.) Anyway, that will be two seasons in a row that Dana Altman will have missed the NCAA Tournament, and thus one begins to wonder how much longer Altman will remain in Eugene. Just thinking out loud here!

Automatic qualifier: Arizona
Locks: UCLA
Waiting game: USC, Arizona State

USC (22-10, 14-6; NET: 50, SOS: 63): After the loss to Arizona State Thursday, USC remains more likely than not to get in the tournament, but boy they really haven’t gone out of their way to ensure it, have they? Even as the Trojans have played materially better down the stretch, they haven’t impressed, and their resume remains dependent on a glut of decent Quadrant 2 wins. This is likely a No. 10 seed, or thereabouts, but the stuff on this team sheet is close enough to the bubble that we’re holding off on certainty for now.

Arizona State (22-12, 11-9; NET: 66, SOS: 54): Having upset Arizona in Tucson on the shot of the season to date, Arizona State was probably always stretching it hoping for another win over the Wildcats Friday at the Pac-12 tourney. It didn’t happen. Arizona, in a show of casual dominance, pulled away in the second half instead. So what do we make of ASU? They are arguably the bubbliest team on the whole damn bubble. The entire resume is bubbly. The best wins are elite — at Arizona, neutral versus Creighton — but the next best victory from there came Thursday, over USC, and the next best win from there is at Oregon, which, blah. They were among the final teams in the field before Friday night, and we would still have them in, in place of Oklahoma State. But that’s how tight the margins are. A bid thief could be the difference.

SEC

Nobody seems to have clocked that one of the great losses of the 2022-23 season was suffered this weekend. When Kentucky fell to Vanderbilt Friday, we were denied the almost annual ritual of John Calipari spending an extended stretch of Selection Sunday on the ESPN show complaining about how the committee just didn’t watch his team play on Sunday, and how obvious it is, an do these guys even watch the games?, and maybe it’s just because it’s Kentucky that they’re treated this way, he doesn’t know, but in any case his team was seeded at least three lines lower than they should have been, and everyone knows it.

This sort of spiel used to entertain us greatly every year. Alas, it is hard to make these sorts of arguments when you are limping into the postseason. It is also hard when, rather than storming into the field with one of the best teams in the country firing on all cylinders, you’ve won one SEC tournament game in three years and haven’t won in the tournament for — as Kyle Tucker tallied Friday — 1,443 days.

With how Kentucky had played of late, we still held out hope Cal would get on the TV Sunday night and hold forth like the days of old. Alas.

The Athletic has live coverage of the SEC Tournament with analysis, scores and bracket news

Automatic qualifier: Alabama
Locks: Tennessee, Arkansas, Kentucky, Texas A&M, Missouri
Waiting game: Auburn, Mississippi State, Vanderbilt

Vanderbilt (20-14, 11-7; NET: 79, SOS: 24): Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the incredible conference network home cooking we all witnessed Friday night, many Vanderbilt fans woke up this morning fairly certain their team was in the NCAA Tournament, or at least deserved to be. And it’s not like they had no argument. Having knocked off Kentucky again Friday night, Vanderbilt had five Quadrant 1 wins, a 10-10 record against the top two Quadrants, a solid strength of schedule to help explain away some of the losses (including a not-nearly-as-bad as some other bubble teams’ 122 noncon strength of schedule) and a clear pattern of performance over the last month, which probably shouldn’t matter, but is the kind of thing that is attractive to argue, and which, hey, maybe the committee cares about a smidge more than it is officially supposed to. It’s not like Vanderbilt was a mile away. They were, and are, right on the bubble. But they were hardly the sort of sure thing our mentions would have indicated. One person told us Vanderbilt was “playing with house money” today. Not so fast, my friend. Indeed, they were more likely out of the field than in it, and Saturday’s showing against Texas A&M — a very good Texas A&M, but still — won’t have convinced any holdouts on the committee.

Were we the type to bet on this, we would bet Vanderbilt is not in the field. Does that mean it has no chance? Of course not. It’s a possibility — a far more likely one than it was in January, to be sure. Vanderbilt has done a ton since then just to get in this position. If this decision came down to who played the best over the past month, the Dores would be in without a second thought. But the entire season counts, and Vanderbilt was only average for a big part of it. We expect that to cost them Sunday.

Auburn (20-12, 10-8; NET: 32, SOS: 18): In an ideal world, Auburn would have a few more quality wins. It took until last Saturday, and a breakthrough against No. 3 NET Tennessee, for Auburn to arrest its consistent, slow-drip slide toward the bubble. The Tigers hadn’t lost many bad games, but they hadn’t beaten anyway really good, either. They were the platonic ideal of mid. There has been a lot more spark evident lately, not just in the UT win but in a hard-fought loss at Alabama that preceded it, and even in Thursday’s tight loss to Arkansas, in which K.D. Johnson once again gave Auburn productive (and remarkably efficient, especially for him) minutes off the bench. Anyway, Auburn didn’t improve its lot Thursday, and you can poke holes in this team sheet all you want, but the combination of decent metrics and good work against Quadrant 2 (6-1 with just a tight loss at Vanderbilt) should get them in.

Mississippi State (21-11, 8-10; NET: 49, SOS: 37): Much like Rutgers, Mississippi State’s conference tournament, and thus its bubble push, ran aground on the shores of their conference’s No. 1 seed. For Rutgers, it was a hard-fought loss to Purdue. For Mississippi State, it was a throttling at the hands of Alabama, which took one look at the Bulldogs’ total inability to make (or even really attempt) perimeter shots and thought: “yes please.” MSU scored 49 points in 64 possessions Friday, which, yeah: Regular readers know the drill on Mississippi State’s offense. When they play like they did Thursday, when Tolu Smith dominates down low, rebounds everything, and the Bulldogs back it up with their elite defense, they’re a really tough out. But they’re on the very heart of the bubble because they have had so many games where the lack of offense tips the scales too far in the opposite direction. Also not unlike Rutgers.

And, like Rutgers, we think the Bulldogs would be in right now. Their late-season push has been fruitful enough to maybe even get them clear of the First Four, although, now that we think about it, Maybe Rutgers and Mississippi State can play in the First Four? Now that’s a ratings fiesta waiting to happen. First to 43 wins!

Others

Memphis is a lock. We are probably behind the curve a bit here; frankly, the Tigers were probably safe before the postseason began, after they played so well against Houston (before ultimately losing by a bucket) in the final game of the regular season. Memphis has just three Quadrant 1 wins, but did so against a schedule that offered up just seven opportunities in that space. Where the Tigers have really excelled — both in league play and especially in their very strong (No. 34) nonconference schedule — is Quadrant 2. Combined, Memphis is now 12-7 in the top two quadrants, a strong enough body of work that they’ll likely end up as a single-digit seed regardless of what happens Sunday at the American Athletic Conference title game, where the pageantry is always unmatched.

Locks: Houston, Saint Mary’s,Florida Atlantic, Memphis
Should be in: Boise State, Utah State
Waiting game: Nevada, North Texas
Automatic qualifiers: Drake (Missouri Valley), Furman (SoCon), Louisiana (Sun Belt), Kennesaw State (Atlantic Sun), UNC Asheville (Big South), Southeast Missouri (Ohio Valley), Fairleigh Dickinson (NEC), Charleston (CAA), Northern Kentucky (Horizon), Oral Roberts (Summit), Gonzaga (WCC), Texas A&M-Corpus Christi (Southland), Colgate (Patriot), Montana State (Big Sky), Vermont (America East), Howard (MEAC), Texas Southern (SWAC), San Diego State (Mountain West), Kent State (MAC), Iona (MAAC), UC Santa Barbara (Big West), Princeton (Ivy), VCU (Atlantic 10)

Boise State (22-8, 13-5; NET: 28, SOS: 59): The Broncos needed overtime after a Shane Nowell buzzer-beater tied it for UNLV in regulation, but after all that drama overtime was a pretty casual affair, a 14-3 romp that made the final score look like overtime never happened at all. There’s a metaphor in there for Boise State’s bubble year, when the Broncos looked to be in some trouble at various stages but have since closed strongly.

Utah State (25-8, 13-5; NET: 18, SOS: 76): We said it Friday, after a convincing win over Boise State. We’ll say it again one more time, after a very close call against San Diego State in the Mountain West conference tournament title game: Put Utah State in the field. Yes, OK, the team sheet is a bit weird, reliant on Boise’s NET supremacy for both of its Quadrant 1 wins, but hey, those still count, plus Utah State is 9-1 in Quadrant 2, and that feels more pertinent than two bad nonconference losses just before Christmas (to Weber State and SMU, both at home, both in Quadrant 4). Most of all, this just looks like a good team. The analytics mostly back that up. There is some strange disagreement — BPI has Utah State 40th, Pomeroy and the NET are obviously top-20-level fans, while the predictive metrics go in either direction, KPI 11th and strength of record 30th. In any case, none of them are prohibitive, and mostly back up what we see when we watch this team play: tournament-level quality. We think Utah State’s run to the cusp of the MWC title should convince the committee, too, but they’ll be sweating it out this weekend all the same.

VCU (26-7, 15-3; NET: 61, SOS: 178): A wild VCU appearance! The Rams took until the last possible shred of a window to get themselves on the bubble, but they managed it, winning their eighth game in a row Saturday and progressing to the A-10 title game. There’s a reason it’s taken VCU this long to reach bubble relevancy: The A-10 is down, and the Rams did not play a very good nonconference schedule. As such, VCU only played one Quadrant 1 opponent (Memphis, to whom it lost 62-47), and it picked up a few variably bad losses in nonconference play. Mostly, though, the Rams just haven’t had the chance to play good competition; they’ve only played seven Quadrant 2 games for that matter, too. Still, having streaked to the finish in their league, and playing quality basketball right now, there’s a least a chance they get a long look if they lose in the A-10 tourney tomorrow. They’re worth that — even if only now.

Nevada (21-10, 12-6; NET: 37, SOS: 70): For as bad as Nevada’s meltdown has been — and it was punctuated by an intentional foul call on an SJSU inbounds play in the final seconds of overtime Thursday that was just the dumbest decision of March thus far, and might actually take the title the rest of the month, just the perfect punctuation to Nevada’s last two weeks — shout out to San Jose State. For most of the nearly two decades we’ve been writing about college basketball, San Jose State was a joke, most notable for a deranged court design and for being reliably terrible, in that order. Their KenPom.com program rank is No. 260. They’ve only occasionally broken the top 200 in adjusted efficiency the past two decades. From 2018 to 2021, under Jean Prioleau, San Jose State finished 301, 343, 290, and 333 in the KenPom rankings. Tim Miles has them ranked 91st. On Thursday, the Spartans won their 20th game of the season, the first time the program has hit that mark in 40 years. Nevada lost to a good team, in other words, and a team that is vastly better under Miles than it has been at almost any other point in its history. We’re sure that will help Steve Alford feel better.

‌North Texas (24-7, 16-4; NET: 38, SOS: 125): North Texas’s loss to UAB Friday night set up the bubble’s best chance for a bid thief — UAB playing FAU in the CUSA title game Saturday. Never mind all that: FAU hammered the Blazers pretty much from the opening tip. FAU: very good! North Texas is on the far fringe of the bubble, and UAB is even further out, but we wanted to close the loop on this whole UAB bid thief arc. No bid thieves this year. How crazy is that?

(Top photo of Penn State’s Micah Shrewsberry and Jalen Pickett: Michael Reeves / Getty Images)