Teams that should be in: Baylor, Iowa State, Oklahoma St
Work left to do: West Virginia, Texas
If you spend most of your analytical energy looking at tempo-free statistics, you already know how good Oklahoma is. Lon Kruger's team, despite its 17-7 record, is playing the best defense in the Big 12 (and is among the nation's three or four best defenses adjusted for competition). The Sooners' status on the Bubble Watch now reflects that fact. How does a seven-loss team with defeats to Creighton and Kansas State get locked in on Feb. 10? Here's how: Thirteen of OU's 24 games have come against top-50 opponents. More impressive? After Monday's 94-83 win over Iowa State, the Sooners are 9-4 in those games. No, top-50 wins aren't everything, but if there is any one obvious indication of how a team might perform in the NCAA tournament, having a 70-ish win percentage against tourney-caliber teams is an awfully good place to start. Throw in top-15 RPI and SOS numbers and it would be impossible to foresee Oklahoma missing the tournament even if Lon Kruger's team showed signs of cooling off. They don't and this is a done deal. (So, for that matter, is Kansas State, which fell to 12-12 with a sub-100 RPI after Saturday's loss.)
Baylor [18-6 (6-5), RPI: 14, SOS: 8] In mid-January, you could have convinced us that Baylor would end up on the bubble. Now the Bears are closing in on a lock. Monday night's home loss to Oklahoma State prevented the Bears from adding another win to its nice collection of top-50 wins. But with RPI and SOS numbers floating near (or in) the top 10, no bad losses and a reliable offensive attack predicated on 3s and offensive rebounds, the Bears are suddenly closing in on lock status anyway.
Iowa State [17-6 (7-4), RPI: 16, SOS: 34] We blanched at locking in Iowa State too early, and lo and behold ... OK, just kidding. Easy, Cyclones fans. It's all good. Sure, wins at Kansas at Oklahoma on the past two Mondays might have put your team on the No. 2 line. It certainly would have earned a lock. The upside is those losses barely register here. There are niggles with this resume, namely that road loss at Texas Tech (for which ISU extracted merciless revenge in Saturday's 75-38 win), but otherwise it's perfectly sound. Let's see how Saturday's home game against West Virginia plays out before we go a-locking.
Oklahoma St [17-7 (7-5), RPI: 21, SOS: 29] Bubble teams of the world, take heed: This is how you bolster a bid. On Saturday, the Cowboys upset Kansas at home 67-62 after giving up 41 points in the first half. Maybe the two-day turnaround was a plus, because OSU stayed hot against Baylor Monday, scoring 74 points in 64 possessions even if you don't count the awkward deflection Oklahoma State scored against itself in the first half. (It was pretty funny.) Those two wins, against teams with an average RPI of 5.5, take Oklahoma State from roughly a No. 9-seed into much safer territory. If it weren't for an undercooked nonconference schedule, we'd be thinking lock. Either way, no team in the country had a better three days.
West Virginia [18-5 (6-4), RPI: 26, SOS: 80] The 2014-15 Big 12 can occasionally prompt you to write ridiculous sentences, such as this one: Is it time to worry about West Virginia? This after two straight losses at Oklahoma and Baylor, two top-15 RPIs with similarly lofty efficiency numbers. Sure, both losses were blowouts for a team many (including us) has often thought was the best Big 12 title contender outside Kansas and Iowa State. But still, patently ridiculous, right? Maybe. More than any individual damage, WVU's two-game slide highlights the fact that the last time this team won a top-50 game was Jan. 13. And that one of its two top-50 wins came at home against Wofford. And that while it has handled the Big 12's bottom three (Kansas State, TCU, Texas Tech) well enough, it is still waiting for a win over Iowa State, Kansas, Texas, Baylor and Oklahoma State. And that after the Mountaineers play Kansas State in Morgantown Wednesday, they face the aforementioned Quintuplet of Doom in each of their past seven regular-season games -- four of which are on the road. In the immortal words of Jurassic Park chief engineer Ray Arnold: Hold on to your butts.
Texas [15-8 (4-6), RPI: 32, SOS: 12] It wasn't pretty, but Texas' 61-57 win at K-State on Saturday managed to stop the bleeding. It's an impressive win in that regard: After four straight losses, the absolute last thing the Longhorns needed was a tricky road game against a desperate and fractured team that nonetheless won at Oklahoma in January. To leave with a win is a step forward -- insofar as it isn't another step backward. Next up comes the rare bona fide Big 12 scheduling break: two games in a row at home, against TCU and Texas Tech. Winning both will preserve Texas' run of zero bad losses and, if all goes well, maybe build some cohesion before the five-game butcher shop (at Oklahoma, Iowa State, at West Virginia, at Kansas, Baylor) that follows.
