With each passing day we draw closer and closer to the magic of March Madness. We’re not quite there yet, but you can feel the excitement and buzz growing, especially now as the calendar reads February. It’s a month closer to the insanity that is the world’s greatest sports tournament and it also means we’re nearer to figuring out just who exactly will be invited to the Dance.
Those invitations will be fleeting, meaning teams will have to play at their best from here on out, especially if they’re on the bubble. We’ve seen a lot of basketball these first three months of the season and learned many things, but fortunes can still sink or rise in the weeks of February before the real games start playing out.
More than half of the 68 bids to the NCAA Tournament are at-large invitations and the quest to figure those out will take us all the way up to Selection Sunday. As previously mentioned, each and every day can affect certain teams in a major way. A great performance can push a team into the Tournament field while the opposite could sink a resume. We’ve got several weeks full of anticipation and a lot of resume talk ahead.
For now, we’re looking closely at recent results because these games are very important, especially in these close conference battles. Today we’re considering a number of teams that were winners very recently who put themselves in a better position for the NCAA Tournament. We’re not just considering bubble teams, but also teams fighting for better seeding or other kinds of positioning. We won’t really know the bubble for many weeks, but let’s run through a few winners hoping to find themselves on the right side of it.