Welcome to Season Four of TourneyBubble, your home for biased and cynical coverage of the NCAA Tournament Bubble. That’s right, it’s our fourth season of bitching about Virginia Tech, the NCAA, Gene Smith, Andy Katz, Andy Glockner and ESPN. And if you’re a Hokie fan who has been following the trials and tribulations of America’s Bubble Team, it’s felt more like 362 seasons.
When we first started this site we intended it to be a counter to all the pre-processed bubble garbage spewed out by ESPN, only to find that we have cursed our favorite teams (Virginia Tech and Old Dominion) to three years of bubble torture (for both) and bubble heartbreak (for Tech only). It’s been a grind just watching these three years, let alone writing about it.
But this year it will all end, and the young Hokies will break out of the ACC pack and emerge as a top-7 seed and be safely in the tournament. Either that or they will go 4-12 in the ACC and actually let me relax during the month of March. Gone, also, are quintessential bubble players Malcolm Delaney and Jeff Allen, making way for a new crop of Virginia Tech hoopsters to fail when it counts the most and miss the tournament once again.
Poor Seth Greenberg. Look at him. You can see all four oh-so-close seasons just hanging right over his head. Virginia Tech - whatever happens this year, please just make it easy on him. I don't think he can take another year of drawn-out bubble hell.
On the flipside, the Old Dominion Monarchs are looking to build on their consecutive CAA titles and make a run into the second weekend of the NCAA Tournament. Assholes.
The bubble journey begins in less than a month. Who will be this year’s Central Florida – building a resume worthy of an at-large before pooping the bed in Conference USA play? And who will be this year’s UAB – never building a resume worthy of an at-large but getting one anyway because they’re sort-of-a-mid-major and then pooping the bed in the NCAA Tournament? All those answers and more in season four of TourneyBubble.
