Following up on my pre-tournament post regarding the performance of Bubble Teams over the past 5 years, I thought it would be fun to look at how this year’s crop did. Again, I defined a Bubble Team as an 11 or higher at-large team. Over the past 5 tournaments, there were an average of 4.25 such teams, and those teams averaged .5 wins each – greatly inflated by George Mason’s Final Four run. Excluding GMU, such teams average .35 wins each.
Fast forward to the 2009 tournament. Only two teams meet the definition of Bubble Team, Arizona and Dayton, as the tournament committee gave the 11-16 seeds to the automatic bids from the tiny conferences. At this point, those two teams have 3 wins – blowing away the .5 average. The tournament committee received a ton of flack from Big Media for leaving the Mount Saint Mary’s of the world out, but it looks like they either made stronger picks this year, or got lucky.
