Two more weekends left in the regular season. It’s serious now. A lot of the narratives we’ve watched through the season are really coming to fruition. Remember last week when I asked why Maryland hadn’t cracked 196 yet and now that’s happened twice? I do plenty of jinxing as well, and there are some stories we won’t know the ending of until the postseason (nobody’s mind was changed by that particular Florida 198, right?) Let’s see how many of this week’s thoughts aren’t completely obsolete by the end of the regular season.
Question: Are we going to have an interesting bubble again this year?
It’s tight down there. By my count, 11 teams currently in the top 36 can mathematically drop out this week, and nine teams outside can enter. Some of those are admittedly dependent on some pretty unlikely scenarios (San Jose State can rank No. 36 with back-to-back program records on its double meet weekend only if nobody else improves, for example), but plenty of teams don’t need to stretch the limits of plausibility. Even the ones who only have mathematical possibilities of moving up due to a double this weekend can certainly take advantage of those schedules to move themselves into the outside of the bubble proper, from where they can then try to…
