This year the talk is that there looks to be fewer bubble teams competing for more spots than usual. That’s what they mean by the bubble being weak. Every year you have bubble busters who up and win a mid-major tournament and get the automatic bid, so the favorite takes an at-large, so that’s one less at-large available for the bubble teams. But this year, most of those would be much bigger upsets than is typical. So it stands to reason fewer of them will happen. For example, if someone is going to beat Gonzaga or St Mary’s, it’ll be a huge upset. Who’s gonna beat Belmont? Who’s gonna get past UCLA, Oregon and Arizona in the Pac-12?

In addition, most of those teams you’re talking about who have beaten top teams, also have bad losses. Marquette lost by double digits to St Johns. K St lost to Oklahoma by 30. tech lost at home to Ohio and NC State. Indiana lost to Fort freakin’ Wayne. And so on. Our worst loss by far is Oakland, and it was single digits on the road. And they’ll probably be in the top 100 when it’s said & done.

Our RPI is 50 right now. With a win over Ark, plus one in the SEC-T, we’ll be close to 40. I know the RPI isn’t the holy grail it once was, it’s going away, etc, but all that being said, the fact remains that since going to 64 teams umpteen years ago, no Big-6 conference team has ever been left out with an RPI better than 40. So we’ll be in the hunt. Not a lock, but certainly on the bubble.