Believe it or not, we’ve reached week 10 of the regular season, and it’s already time to start looking at the regionals qualification bubble. As a reminder, qualification is based on NQS, which is calculated by taking a team’s top six scores of the season, at least three of which must be on the road, dropping the highest score overall, and averaging the remaining five.
Each year in this series we take a look at each “bubble” team’s highest possible NQS after this coming weekend’s slate and discuss what they’ll need to do to finish in the top 36 and make regionals. This week, we’ll stick only to team discussion, adding in potential individual qualifiers next week.
Let’s start with a postseason bracket projection based on current standings. Teams in bold are located within 400 miles of a host site, so we have placed them accordingly (geography does not matter for the top 16 seeds). The remaining teams were placed using a mixture of geography and conference alignment while attempting to keep the playing field as level as possible.
Note: While official rankings are released each Monday, we are using unofficial NQS rankings following the March 5 Maryland at Temple meet throughout this article.
| University Park | Seattle | Tuscaloosa | Salt Lake City |
| 1…. |
