College Basketball Bubble Watch By Eamonn Brennan | ESPN.com Email



Bubble Watch: Can Indiana save its upside-down season?

When Northwestern and Indiana played at Assembly Hall in Bloomington Saturday, they might as well have tipped off in the Upside Down.

What game could better illustrate the bizarre (un)reality of the Hoosiers' 2016-17 season than this? When Indiana held on for a 63-62 win, the world in which it was registered was one in which the Wildcats had suffered a minor blow to their still-solid NCAA tournament hopes, and one in which Indiana maybe -- just maybe -- wasn't out of this thing quite yet.

Then again, maybe the most right-side-down moment of IU's season had come 10 days earlier, at Minnesota. A season ago, as the Hoosiers roared to an outright Big Ten title and a Sweet 16 trip, Minnesota won eight games and dismissed multiple players. Yet on Feb. 15, Indiana's one-point loss at Minnesota had, somehow, become a blown chance at a marquee road victory and an opportunity to climb the bubble ladder against a superior, tourney-bound Gophers team.

Believe it or not, this is where Indiana (16-13) finds itself in advance of Tuesday's road trip to No. 16 Purdue (ESPN2 & ESPN App, 7 p.m. ET). Tom Crean's team is staring longingly upward not merely at teams like Minnesota and Northwestern but at the entire 2017 bubble, too. And whatever glimmer of hope Thomas Bryant's game-winning 3-point play against the Wildcats gave his team will be snuffed out entirely if Indiana fails to complete the improbable task of beating the Big Ten's best team in its own gym.

If it feels difficult to imagine as of Tuesday morning, it should. Prior to Saturday, IU had lost its past five and seven of its past eight games, a slide that took it from a safe, single-digit seed in January bracket projections to all the way out of the field. The longer trajectory is even less flattering. The Hoosiers opened the 2016-17 season with a neutral-court overtime win over Kansas, now the 13-time Big 12 regular-season champion, and, 19 days later, comfortably handled the newly clinched ACC champs, North Carolina, at home.

Those wins remain the main points in Indiana's bubble favor. They're also a big part of why the Hoosiers' résumé is so bewildering. Another reason: IU's eight home nonconference guarantee games -- the "come on over and take a beating" schedule-fillers every big program plays in November and December -- carried an average opponent RPI of 276.8. Five of those games came against teams ranked outside the RPI top 290! The RPI's schedule-obsessed formula was never going to look favorably on that.

Had the Hoosiers carried on their projected top-15 (or even top-25) road map throughout Big Ten play, their raw RPI number wouldn't have mattered (or suffered) quite so much. Now, after months of turnover-riddled offense and a Big Ten-worst defense, a team that beat the Tar Heels and Jayhawks in November (seriously!) finds its RPI in the high 80s -- a space at-large teams basically never occupy.

Which is how Indiana has arrived at late February in which its last best hope is to win at Purdue -- and only because it got a one-point home win over a team that has never been to the NCAA tournament. The 2016-17 bubble is strange, but nothing is stranger than this.