Bubble Watch on St. Mary's:
Saint Mary's [27-5 (15-3), RPI: 38, SOS: 165] This season, Saint Mary's swept Gonzaga in conference play for the first time since the mid-1990s. That's worth noting for two reasons. One: The 2015-16 season is already a legendary one for Gaels men's basketball. And two: If you expected Mark Few's team to lose three games to the same WCC opponent in one season, you were kidding yourself.
The question now is whether SMC will get in despite its failure to grab the conference's automatic bid. Frankly, it's hard to see how it wouldn't. Sure, there are the two weird, regular-season losses to Pepperdine sprinkled in there, but that -- and the lack of top-50 wins -- are the only two flaws with a team that has nonetheless played 32 games and lost five of them. If the Gaels are short of a lock, it's because the committee can be weird. Depending on how the bubble shakes out, they may get there before the end of the week. Either way, we expect they'll be fine.
--> I don't know, beating good teams and not losing to bad ones has been the established method of getting into the dance, and St. Mary's failed each of those. Not sure why they should be treated any different than other teams. They
literally do not have a Top 50 win. Not
one. And they have two sub-100 losses.
Sorry, a team with whose only win against a tournament team came against it's conference auto-qualifier (who wouldn't have made it without the autobid) isn't a tournament team.
