I took a bit of a deep dive look at "the bubble." Most of what we needed to happen in the last few days has worked so we still have a chance. First off, I will say that everyone on the bubble is either pretty flawed or lacking in some way. No one on the bubble in my mind has a real great case for crying foul if they don't get in. That includes us for sure.
I would put us in the lacking group. We aren't terribly flawed with just GW as a really bad loss. But we are lacking good wins and even good performances against good teams. Zero Q1 wins and only 3 Q2 wins are both very low number of quality wins even for bubble teams. Our best win is against Net 49 URI and we actually split with them. Our games against the top of our schedule weren't super impressive - - blown out by Texas and totally handled by TCU and Fairfield (at home), split with URI, lost 2 out of 3 against GM. Best OOC win is Columbia at Net 60. And that's the sum total of our games against Top 60. 3 -6 isn't great and the deeper dive says only 2 of those were against even Top 40 teams. In the 40-60 range, we were still only 3-4. Also, 3rd in the regular season in a mid-major conference and out in the semi's in the tourney aren't a good springboard to an at-large. So our 37 net might look a little generous to some.
Our one clear positive is the strength of our OOC schedule. Committees (both Men's and Women's) have generally seemed to look at this closely. As a general matter, its really not good to be a bubble team with an especially weak OOC schedule. Its less clear that bubble teams with particularly good OOC schedules get much credit for this. So it seems to be a disqualifier more than anything!
Again, none of this is awful when compared to other bubble teams; none of whom have stellar overall resumes. For us it may come down to whether the Committee is more interested in denying bids to teams with more negatives or awarding bids to teams with more positives. The problem as I see it will be the Power school committee members being much more interested in talking about Q1 and Q2 wins and accomplishments against better schools (numerous flaws be damned). The P5 schools generally have more positives AND more negatives than we do.
In the end, sadly, I don't think we are going to make it. Without the GW loss I think we are a much more interesting case because we'd be pretty flawless against a group of deeply flawed teams, but still no lock to get in. But as things are, I think enough committee members will look at both zero Q1 wins and a Q4 loss and say we are both flawed and haven't achieved and pass us up! While I hope I am wrong, I don't think we will have a ton of room to complain. I think in their hearts, our team (players and coaches) probably feel like they left a little bit out there this year letting a few get away from us etc.
