NCAA Women’s 2013: Baylor’s Sweet 16 loss to Louisville validates rising women’s game

The women’s NCAA tournament has only matched the men’s tournament in earnest since 1996--that was the year the 64-team field was truly seeded without regard to geography--and since then, the popularity of the women’s tournament has generally operated on a principle opposite its male counterpart: Favorites win.

As shocking as it was to see the No. 5-seeded Louisville Cardinals hold on for an 82-81 win over the Baylor Bears, and as many casual followers who may lose touch with the rest of the field without the name recognition of Brittney Griner, Sunday’s result may have done more good for women’s basketball in validating its level of competition.

Baylor was the No. 1 overall seed in the tournament and the favorite to repeat as national champion. The Bears were undefeated last season and had lost one game in 2012-13 before Sunday, a 71-69 loss at Stanford (also a No. 1 seed in the tournament, also eliminated in the Sweet 16 in a loss to No. 4 seed Georgia) in which Baylor played all but five minutes of the game without Odyssey Sims, their All-American point guard. So really, Baylor hadn’t lost a game it couldn’t explain away since March 29, 2011 in the Elite Eight to Texas A&M, the eventual national champion that year.

This is the stigma women’s basketball faces every year: The top teams seem so much better than even the great teams in the second tier--teams in the top 10 of the AP poll every week--and the semiweekly competitions seem less like, in this year’s case, Will Baylor win? and more like Will Baylor win by 25?

And is that question off-base by much? The Bears had a 34-point win over the Kentucky Wildcats in November and a 23-point win over the Tennessee Volunteers in December, and both of those schools are in the Elite Eight. Baylor’s average margin of victory in Big 12 play was 26.2 points, and that league sent seven of its 10 teams to the NCAA tournament.

The question has hung over the women’s tournament for years. Tennessee dominated it throughout the ‘90s, and the Connecticut Huskies were unmatched in the 2000s. Those two schools have won 15 titles, and the tournament has only been played since 1982. Only four other schools have won the title more than once in its 31 previous editions (all four of those teams have precisely two titles). Of the eight teams left in the 32nd tournament currently underway, Notre Dame is the only team with a championship other than Connecticut and Tennessee. Only twice has a team seeded higher than No. 4 made it to the national championship game. Neither won.

So when a team like Baylor loses as early as it lost Sunday, it’s newsworthy. Even better, it’s newsworthy in a way women’s basketball is so rarely newsworthy: The field of 64’s overwhelming favorite, the team with that field’s two best players, was eliminated at the tournament’s halfway point. It was eliminated by a team that--all right, the Cardinals were 16-of-25 from behind the arc, but Louisville’s win was not a fluke because of freakish shooting. It entered a game in which it was largely written off, exploded out to a big lead not because it shot better but because it played better, and it found a way to win when the other team with better players started to come back. Perhaps an appropriate analogue considering those points would be Wichita State’s win over Ohio State on Saturday in the Elite Eight of the men’s tournament.

In the men’s tournament, it’s accepted as gospel: Anyone Can Win. Florida Gulf Coast can make the Sweet 16 as a No. 15 seed, and we’ll all be equal parts captivated and charmed and flummoxed, but we’ll know we should only be so surprised because Anyone Can Win.

The women’s tournament, for much of its limited history, has operated on a principle of opposite value. Predicting whether Louisville’s win Sunday will do anything to advance the game and its signature event beyond its current perceived state would be a fruitless exercise. But women’s basketball is better (define “better” any way you choose, really) than it has been at any point in its history, and Louisville’s win Sunday validated that the tournament is, too.