Part of the reality of the college basketball bubble unfolds within a single conference. If you’re a Wisconsin fan, your primary point of focus is the Big Ten: How many good teams exist in the league? Which teams in the conference are on the bubble? What do teams need to do in February and early March to improve their bubble position and make the NCAA Tournament? What Big Ten Conference record will enable a given team to make the NCAAs, and what conference record won’t be good enough?
These are all important and necessary questions. Yet, the bubble picture goes beyond a team’s own conference. That conference shapes most of the bubble landscape, but the other conferences complete the picture and offer a fuller, more accurate representation of what bubble teams are fighting against. With this in mind, let’s focus a little more consciously and specifically on teams outside the Big Ten which are battling with Wisconsin for bubble spots.
Why is Wisconsin above the bubble cut line? Broadly speaking, other conferences aren’t making convincing cases that their bubble teams should be in the NCAA Tournament. More specifically, this point is affirmed when looking at individual teams such as the Stanford Cardinal.
Stanford beat Oklahoma and lost to Butler and Kansas in non-conference play. The Cardinal won their first four Pac-12 games and had no bad losses. They were solidly in the NCAA Tournament — not a lock (few teams are true locks in mid-January, given all the basketball which remains to be played), but well above dozens of teams which were closer to the bubble cut line. Now, though, Stanford looks very different.
Stanford lost on Thursday night at home to an Oregon State team which had lost four straight games. Stanford has lost to USC, California, and Oregon State in consecutive games and now faces Oregon on the weekend. If the Cardinal lose to the Ducks, they will have lost four straight games. Cal and Oregon State are not good losses.
Stanford is very clearly below Wisconsin in any two-team bubble comparison. The Cardinal have fewer losses than UW, but bubble comparisons aren’t straight win-loss comparisons, as veteran bubble watchers know. If they WERE pure win-loss comparisons, mid-majors with 25-4 records would always get in over the 18-13 team which finished eighth in the Big 12. We know that’s not how it works.
Stanford is just one of several examples which show why, as bad as things might be for Wisconsin, other teams trying to make the NCAA Tournament are in evidently worse shape. Keep that in mind over the next six weeks.