I put this as part of a long form piece on the front page, but I want to recapitulate it briefly here since I think it'll be salient to a lot of the conversations going on in various threads on the board.

First, my premise: For Duke to not make the tourney this year, they'll likely need to have a worse resume than Notre Dame did last year. Notre Dame was one of the "Last 4 In" out of the ACC, and the conference was undeniably worse last year than it is this year. So, what were the key parts of Notre Dame's resume? Let's focus on three features: 11 total losses, 1 "bad" (Q3/4) loss, and 2 Q1 wins.

Now, the first important point: It is extremely likely Duke will have at least 2 Q1 wins and less than 1 "bad" loss by the end of the season. The Xavier and Iowa neutral site wins are safely in Q1, and while the home Ohio State win looks precarious as our 3rd Q1 win, the home Miami win could easily ascend. We also will get a handful more opportunities before things end. Meanwhile, we only have 3 projected Q3/Q4 games left, two of which are at home. The other is this Saturday against Georgia Tech, so if we can make it out of Atlanta unscathed we'll likely be OK as it pertains to bad losses.

With that in mind, I posit that for Duke's resume to be worse than Notre Dame's last year, it'll require losing at least five more regular season games, which would give us 11 regular season losses. If we go look at Torvik's projections, the likelihood of us losing all five of the games we're least likely to win is less than 5%.

Obviously that number is a lot higher than we'd like, but it points to the fact that we've built a pretty nice buffer between us and the bubble, to the point that we'd have to be exceptionally bad/unlucky down the stretch to be really sweating come Selection Sunday. And this is arguably the most pessimistic scenario: if we were to say win one of @UVA, @UNC, @Miami, or home UNC, that'll likely be another Q1 win that'll give us even more of a buffer in case something extra weird happens.

Now, let me be clear: I'm not saying that there's no chance we won't make the tourney. Torvik isn't omniscient... for instance, you might think we're going to lose all of our remaining road games because of our recent performances, which would change this hypothetical. What I'm trying to show is that, when you compare our resume to what the resumes of actual bubble teams actually look like, a LOT would have to go wrong for us to be in legitimate danger.

I hope this provides some solace to the board, and for those who I've disagreed with on this topic, I hope that this hard analysis provides some concrete support to my argument. I look forward to continued debate