Where have all the good teams gone?

One of the most common refrains you'll hear in the world of college basketball as January turns to February turns to March is how "the bubble is weak this year".  That's a corollary to the truisms most often heard in pro sports about there being "no great teams" (TM: Joe Morgan) or the season having "a lot of parity".  Usually I'm unswayed by those claims because we hear them every year, but in this basketball season, it sure seemed as if  there was more parity.  Bubble teams seemed to lose left and right, throwing away every chance they had to establish position in the latter part of the season.  Was it true?

I took a quick look at the last four years - the 68 team tournament era.  At least if we can call four years an era, or if we want to enshrine the expanded monstrosity in such a way.  I looked at two things - average losses by the at-large field and average losses by the RPI top 50.  Both have their disadvantages.

If underdogs disproportionately pulled off  upsets in their conference tournaments one year, better teams were in the at-large pool, driving down the average losses just a bit, whether it be via mid-major bid thieves or power conference teams on the top lines.  With the top 50 RPI criteria, a few extra mid-majors "gaming" (I use those quotes decidedly) the system a bit more and bumping into the top 50 could skew things.  But anyway, without further rambling:



So in other words, while this year might have displayed a bit more parity than the past couple, you'd have to go all the way back to...2011 to see a season that was had more losses by teams at the top of the heap.  That year a ridiculous 5 teams made the field of 68 with 14 losses - Michigan State, Marquette, Tennessee, Penn State, and USC (in a First Four game).  Only six other teams outside of 2011 had made the field with so many losses, none since that year, and only two of the others in the past 20 years.

What actually happened as this season came to a close was the bubble shrinking more and more as Championship Week continued.  The only somewhat controversial selection (compared to a few questionable seeding decisions) was 13-loss NC State getting a bid to Dayton for the Opening Round over 23-9 SMU, but that was met with relatively little consternation.   Even Dick Vitale, whose "heart break[ing]" for the kids getting a "raw deal" is an annual tradition each Selection Sunday at 7PM, had little to say about this.  So while the teams on the outside might well have been worse than normal, there were enough good teams that the delineation between the haves and haves-not was clear.