Despite a lackluster resume and losses in five of the last six contests, Stanford still has a reasonable shot to hear their name called on Selection Sunday. But it won't be easy.
The last time Stanford (8-6, 0-3 ACC) missed the NCAA tournament was 1986. That was Tara VanderVeer's second year on The Farm, and 20 years before this year's freshmen were born.
This year's squad, in head coach Kate Paye's first season, has found it difficult to win against quality competition. They had an excellent LSU team on the ropes in Baton Rouge, only to squander a three possession lead in the final minute and fall in overtime. On Sunday they led much of the way at Clemson, but once again could not pull out the win in extra time.
But despite their lack of marquee wins, my analysis still gives them in the ballpark of one-in-four odds to have a bubble caliber resume entering the ACC tournament. And I certainly wouldn't bet against this coaching staff or roster.
Using BartTorvik's Wins Above Bubble metric (WAB), we can see that Stanford is approximately 1.1 wins worse than a bubble resume at their current record. This suggests that an average bubble team would have 9.1 wins and 4.9 losses against Stanford's schedule to date. Thus, if you changed any one of their outcomes, like perhaps just one of the overtime losses, they would currently be firmly in tournament consideration with just -0.1 WAB.
The remainder of the ACC schedule is a gauntlet. The Cardinal play 15 more regular season conference games, and an average bubble team would only win about half of those contests. To finish with a positive WAB at the end of the regular season, Stanford will need to find a way to win at least 9 of those 15. As it stands now, 7 of the games figure to be Quad 1.
I simulated the regular season 100,000 times, and determined that the Cardinal reach or surpass the requisite 9 wins about 25% of the time. Those aren't exactly amazing odds, but they tell us the season is far from being over.
If the Cardinal win on Thursday against Florida State, that number will climb above 31%. If they can somehow sweep the two home games this week, they will be looking at better than a 38% chance of heading to the tournament.