I feel like our analysis has been changing from "how many wins can we get to get ourselves a good seed and set us up for a legitimate run?" to "which wins are we going to get to get us to 9-9 and be in the tournament?" It is very frustrating how quickly the expectations of this team plummeted. I think we will make the tournament, but we are quickly running out of margin of error.
8 games left. 2 home games against teams behind us in the standings are games we absolutely should not lose. 1 road game against a team ranked above us in the standings is always a tough proposition (though I hope we get a better effort than we did in that situation last night). If everything goes as expected in those games we are at 7-6. Indiana is going to be another tough one if we keep playing like this, even on our home court, so if we drop that one, 7-7. Nebraska is horrendous, we can take that one on the road, 8-7. We should also take Purdue, who is 5-5 but has been the beneficiary of two games vs. Purdue. 9-7. At Iowa and home against Wisconsin will not be easy games, but if this team relocates their heart, I think we can win both, I'd predict we take one of the two, so 10-8 is my prediction right now.
However, if we keep playing like we have been over this ugly 2-5 stretch, I could see us dropping both Iowa and Wisconsin, that would have us at 9-9 without losing any one game that would really surprise me right now. If that happens, we lose one we shouldn't (which we always seem to do at least once in February, maybe at 5-5 Purdue isn't as terrible as we think they are, maybe Nebraska comes out on fire looking for revenge on their home court for the drubbing we gave them and we come out flat) and we are at 8-10 and squarely on the bubble.
On a side note, the specter of dropping two games to Wisconsin this year is pretty infuriating given that I was expecting us to take two from Wisconsin.
