NCAA tournament 2022 Bubble Watch - Brace yourself for a month of March Madness bracket selection drama

Welcome to Bubble Watch 2022. For the next 33 days right up to Selection Sunday, you'll be asking where the boundary is between «in» and «out» for the NCAA men's basketball tournament field. We're here to help.

The Watch pledges to weigh each stunning upset and shocking surprise and assess what it all means. To summarize those upsets and shocks so far: Virginia won the national title three short years ago but is hanging on by a thread at Bubble Watch. Auburn used to be a football school, but the Tigers are already a lock here. And Wake Forest — yes, Wake Forest! — looks like it will get a chance to win its first NCAA tournament game in 12 years.

This year we've expanded our initial population of Bubble Watch teams by about 10% over and above what we'd usually include. Doing so is our response to the decisions made by the NCAA men's basketball committee over the past two tournaments.

Generally speaking, tournament selection has become more closely aligned with «advanced metrics» in recent years. The rollout of the NCAA's NET rankings prior to the 2019 selection, for example, furnished the committee with a new sorting metric.

On each NET-sequenced team sheet, five additional metrics are listed for the committee's consideration. KenPom, Sagarin and ESPN's BPI can, for lack of a better term, be thought of as team-based measures. KPI and ESPN's strength of record (SOR), conversely, are more outcome-based, assigning a value to each win and loss.

In the past two selections, the committee has tended to weigh outcome-based metrics more heavily than team-based measures near the cut line between the last team in and the first team out. There was, however, one telling exception to this tendency: the committee's selection of Utah