I'm thinking they are already gone and it's just a formality.
Not so fast. When Cruz wins TX, as most polls say he will, it's far from over.
Okay, this is a bit of a mea culpa.
If today's Quinnipiac poll of Florida is even close to true, which has Rubio getting annihilated in his own home state of Florida in two weeks, than the Team Cruz strategy of believing they can get it down to a race between them and Trump absolutely has merit. There is simply no way Rubio could survive not winning his own home state, which is a pure winner-take-all, especially if it's a rout. If Rubio cannot show Jeb getting out of the way can help him win even his own state, then I'm not sure what his path to the nomination is.
Of course, the exact same thing applies to Cruz in Texas on March 1st. He has to win that state.
However, if Cruz does win his own home state, the delegate math absolutely does lend itself to a strategy of him them waiting it out to see if Trump can take out Rubio in Florida. If you run the delegate numbers, which I did this morning, Cruz is far better off sweeping as many of the congressional districts in Texas as he can than winning Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee on Super Tuesday. Especially because those states are all proportional, too. So the likelihood Cruz could win enough in those states to avoid basically a three-way split in the delegates compared to winning more out of Texas is far-fethced. For example, despite Trump's rout in Nevada he only ended up with about 6 more delegates than second place.
In fact, after March 15th I have Trump winning 22 of the 31 contests on the calendar, and he's barely halfway to the 1237 necessary to win the nomination. And even if I'm wrong and Trump wins 30 of the 31 contests, sans Texas, the way the deleages could be proportionally allocated really wouldn't alter that math all that much.
If Rubio were to collapse after not winning his home state, that would effectively put Cruz opposite Trump one-on-one the rest of the way. And all the polls taken so far of Cruz vs. Trump head-to-head have Cruz winning.
So that begs an obvious question -- what is the Rubio strategy? Why are his people calling evangelical leaders and trying to get them to drop Cruz to stop Trump, when they can't even beat Trump in their own state? Why is he spending more money in Texas, a state Rubio can't win, then he's spending in Virginia, which is a state that he could?
When you're attacking rivals with the object of winning that's one thing. But when you do it with no reasonable expectation of winning that's another.