College Basketball Bubble Watch

With work along the bubble line largely complete, all that's left is the sweating

By Eamonn Brennan
ESPN.com

Editor's note: This file has been updated to include all games through Sunday at 4 p.m. ET.

It took us a while, but it usually does. And now we have some semblance of clarity.

Of course, predicting exactly what will happen when the committee makes its final decisions on the 37 at-large teams in the field Sunday is always a hesitant endeavor. You just never know. Few of us saw VCU or UAB as viable tournament teams last season; we were all blown away and outraged and shocked and appalled. But it happens. Subjectively, the committee can see things we don't, can value things we dismiss, can find seemingly nonsensical (and occasionally insightful!) commodities that we've missed for weeks on end.

But it isn't likely. Since Jan. 31, when the great Bubble Watch adventure began, we've pored over the national college hoops bubble with a fine-toothed comb. (In so far as one can use a comb to examine a bubble.) And now that St. Bonaventure has "stolen" the bid of an at-large hopeful by winning the A-10 tourney Sunday afternoon, the relevant games are finished. Teams have completed their resumes. The waiting game begins.

For all of the excellent hoops action Saturday, perhaps the most interesting moment of the day came when selection committee chair Jeff Hathaway casually announced that his committee had already selected the 37 at-large teams in the field. He wasn't definitive, and he didn't offer hints; there is still wiggle room the rest of the way.

Nor was this a particularly shocking revelation: As ESPN.com's Andy Katz wrote Saturday, the committee always has to do its work in advance, because if you started building an entire 68-team tournament together on Sunday, we'd have to start calling it "Selection Sunday and Early Monday."

Still, it was surprising to see a committee chair come right out and say it. For teams doing late work on the bubble -- the Xaviers and NC States and Texases of the world -- the reaction was surely "But you guys saw us play today, right?"

In the end, the mad dash of conference tournament bubble efforts is frequently overplayed. The committee has long since done away with the "final 12 games" criteria, and so its job is to analyze a team's entire body of work. What happened this weekend matters, but maybe not as much as you think.

Comprehensively speaking -- from teams very close to the field, to those with seemingly minuscule odds -- what follows is the bubble as we currently know it. But rest assured, there will be surprises on Sunday. There always are.