Wisconsin bubble watch: the huge Big Ten bubble of 2020

A look at the bubble

The Wisconsin Badgers were steadily moving in the right direction before Wednesday night’s game against the Illinois Fighting Illini. Four straight wins, two of them on the road, one against a likely NCAA Tournament team (Ohio State), all solidified Wisconsin’s resume. However, the Badgers needed to continue to stack wins together. More precisely, they needed to continue to win against NCAA Tournament teams. Milwaukee (Dec. 21) and Rider (Dec. 31) won’t move the needle in terms of bubble placement.

After losing 71-70 to Illinois at home, the Badgers are very much a bubble team, if there was doubt about their status before tip-off. The Badgers have some decent wins which should look good in two months, but they don’t have any conversation-ending, debate-settling wins in a fragile college basketball ecosystem which is still very hard to define.

As you consider the bubble landscape, just how worried should you be? With two months until Selection Sunday, it is too early to make very specific and targeted comparisons between Team A here and Team B over there. We can’t really say that certain teams are battling for at-large bids. That discussion comes into focus in the middle of February. What CAN be said, however, about the bubble right now is that it is extremely large in the Big Ten. Consider what Chris Dobbertean of SB Nation’s Blogging the Bracket had to say about Illinois’ win over Wisconsin:

Chris is not predicting that 12 Big Ten teams will get into the field of 68. He is, however, noting that a lot of Big Ten teams (everyone but Northwestern and Nebraska) has a real chance to get in. There are a lot of resumes with a “kinda sorta maybe” quality to them: obviously worthy of being considered, but just as clearly not good enough to feel secure about the NCAA Tournament. The coming weeks will likely bump a few Big Ten teams into the NIT, but with so many teams winning at home and losing on the road, the Big Ten is very bunched in the middle, with the two NU schools at the bottom and Michigan State at the top. If teams continue to trade wins and losses, the Big Ten bubble will remain very large.

That is one point to keep in mind.

Here is the other one: What happens in one conference has to be measured against other conferences when assessing bubble odds and prospects. The ACC is not very good this season. North Carolina isn’t even a bubble team… unless you are talking about the NIT. UNC might have to play in the CBI this season. Syracuse is in a similar spot.

If you look at the ACC right now, only four teams — Duke, Florida State, Louisville, and Virginia — are in good shape for an NCAA bid. Three other teams — Virginia Tech, North Carolina State, and Pittsburgh — are in bubble territory. This is no joke: The ACC might get only five bids this season. If the ACC gets only five, and the SEC (which has struggled) gets only four bids, and the Pac-12 gets only three, other conferences will have many bids to grab. Enter the Big Ten.

Wisconsin is competing with other Big Ten teams for an at-large bid, but it is also competing with Pittsburgh and USC and bubble teams in other conferences. The Big Ten bubble is an inconvenience — more bubble competition inside the league — but it is also a sign that the teams Wisconsin will play in the coming weeks are decent teams. This means the more Wisconsin can win in this conference (against teams other than Nebraska and Northwestern), the more its resume should improve.

This is what one has to keep in mind about the huge Big Ten bubble of 2020.