Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble! It’s bubble season, bubble week, bubble mania, whatever you want to call it. This is the week when “Who’s in or out?” is the central question in not just college basketball, but American sports. This is the week when “first four in” and “last four out” are the words everyone is interested in.
It all leads up to the unveiling of the brackets on Selection Sunday, one of the most special times of the year in American culture. Brackets then get printed out on Monday and Tuesday. The office pools begin. The 15-over-2 upset picks are made. People make their Final Four selections. Then the games begin and brackets get busted. We all know the drill.
This is the true lead-in to Selection Sunday. USC has an excellent chance of making the NCAA Tournament. The Trojans will make a lot of bubble discussions a moot point if they win one game at the Pac-12 Tournament. That will be enough to seal a bid. However, if USC does lose its first game — Thursday night’s quarterfinal — it will be important for other bubble teams to not play their way into the field.
It’s very unlikely USC will be left out, but crazy things can and do happen in March. The Trojans might need a little bit of insurance if they lose on Thursday night. To that end, we give you this extensive bubble guide for all bubble teams competing with USC for one of the final at-large bids in the 2023 NCAA Tournament. We’ll go through the bubble matchups at the various conference tournaments.
NOTE: If you see an asterisk in the title/heading for a listicle slide, that means it is a projected matchup, not a confirmed matchup. Example: Wisconsin has to beat Ohio State in the Big Ten Tournament before it can play Iowa, so when we refer to “Wisconsin vs. Iowa,” we include an asterisk to indicate that it is a projected matchup which hasn’t been officially created yet.