Bracket seeding is the least exciting part of the NCAA tournament for a lot of viewers. It sometimes feels arbitrary, yet also requires understanding any number of unintuitive acronyms and statistics.
Countdown to Women’s March Madness: The NCAA bracket has a parity problem
As the NCAA tournament draws closer, the challenge of accommodating the unprecedented parity in the women’s game falls to the selection committee.
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But bracket seeding is hugely important, especially in the women’s tournament now that the same No. 1 seeds can no longer be counted on to go the Final Four every year.
Women’s college basketball has long been dominated by a few teams (UConn, Baylor, Tennessee) because it is still young relative to the men’s game, and the infrastructure required to develop enough really strong players to form 16 teams of near-equal ability is still under construction. Because of that, the likelihood of upsets is fairly low in the women’s tournament — and as anyone who’s done a perfunctory office pool is aware, upsets are the bread and butter of win-or-go-home March Madness.
That’s changing, though, slowly but surely. And as the depth in women’s college basketball gets better, the NCAA tournament needs to start paying better attention to how it places teams, especially regionally.
The conversation about how to better foster parity in the women’s game was sparked anew by the preliminary NCAA women’s tournament bracket release Monday, which has inspired some chagrin among women’s basketball analysts.
If you have not been immersed in women’s college basketball rankings, the short version is that teams currently slated to play in Chicago and (particularly) Greensboro have a much tougher path to the Final Four. In this release, Greensboro’s overall seeding is considerably lower (the sum of the teams’ true seeds is 31) than Albany’s (which is 37). A higher seed total means there are more lower ranked teams in the region — which means an easier route to the Final Four for the higher seeds. It’s important to note that this seeding is not definitive, and might change following the end of regular season and conference tournament play. But the worry is that an unbalanced regional bracket could make for a less-competitive Final Four.
On the men’s side, the top 16 teams are all (in theory) strong enough that all four regional pods will be almost equally competitive, regardless of how the teams are placed. On the women’s side, there’s a more pronounced gap between the abilities of an overall 1-seed and an overall 16-seed. Depending on the way the regionals are assigned — which is not just based on pure seeding, but also geography and avoiding in-conference competition — a top-seeded team in one region can have a considerably better chance of making it to the Final Four than a top-seeded team in another region.
The committee winds up prioritizing geography because the support for women’s college basketball teams is still growing, and making games as accessible as possible is a way to make sure people are actually there. But with more teams than ever who can compete at a high level — the top six teams in the AP poll have been reshuffling themselves all season — the NCAA needs to prioritize giving teams that haven’t won in the past the best possible shot to take home the chip over making life easy for fans of more established teams.
ESPN analyst (and let’s face it, hero) Debbie Antonelli has been campaigning for a single-site Sweet Sixteen in Las Vegas for a number of years; that way, teams could be seeded based on their ability and records alone. “Parity is what we asked for, and now we have to manage it with a format change to grow the game,” she tweeted on Tuesday. “We don’t want to seed with the ‘G Curve’ — geography curve. We want an ‘S Curve’: earned seeding.”
UConn v. South Carolina
The biggest game of the week did wind up becoming a classic example of UConn doing UConn things — but only in the second half. South Carolina got out to a quick lead, making their first 10 of 12 shots, and the two teams went into the locker room at halftime just one point apart.
The Huskies exploded in the third quarter to earn a grim-looking, yet symmetrical, 97-79 win. Napheesa Collier’s had a 31-point and 16-rebound performance, which had coach Geno Auriemma doing some light Naismith and Wooden award campaigning after the game. “There can’t be a player who’s playing better or doing more for their team than Napheesa Collier,” Auriemma said. “There’s something about her that’s just rare — you just don’t see it, you don’t see it at all.”
The gaudy score aside, the fact that teams have been able to challenge UConn — even just for a couple of quarters — might turn out to be a double-edged sword.
Yes, there is to some degree a blueprint now for how to beat UConn. That doesn’t mean that blueprint is easy.
“I said that before the season — we can’t guard anybody, we have to make a lot of shots,” Auriemma said. “If we have a bad shooting night, we’re going to lose.” That sentiment was echoed in Collier’s postgame scrum: “As Coach has pointed out, we’re not the best defensive team.”
For South Carolina coach Dawn Staley, the answer to capitalizing on UConn’s “weak” defense (which held her team to 28.5% shooting in the second half) lies in the paint.
“You gotta drive on UConn,” Staley said after the game. “You gotta run them back on their heels, and expect not to get many fouls called — you just gotta play through physical contact, you gotta play through attacking the paint. Obviously [with UConn] there are some shortcomings when it comes to defending — their defense has layers, but you can get inside. If you have an imposing post player, they would have some difficulty matching up. We just couldn’t make that connection with our big tonight.”
The flip side of the blueprint to beat UConn is that UConn also has the blueprint to beating UConn — and, after two high-stakes losses, experience with being challenged and fighting back.
“We have some deficiencies, and teams can exploit that,” Auriemma said after the game. “Obviously teams with great size, we can’t do anything about that. Teams that can score from a lot of different positions, we’re going to struggle with that — again, unless we make shots.
“There are a couple teams out there that because of what they have, we can’t handle them, and that never used to be the case,” he continued. “I always felt like whatever they had, we had an answer for it and this is just not one of those years. But maybe it’s good that we’re going through these moments when we have to try to figure out how to guard three guards that are way quicker than our guards; guard teams that are just a lot bigger or more physical than us. The more we learn about it, the better we’ll be come March.”
Collier echoed that sentiment. “As weird as it sounds, it feels better to know that we know we can stay composed if we’re losing, or if we’re in a high-pressure situation like that,” the senior said after the game. “We hadn’t experienced that until our last couple games in past few years. We know what to do in those situations now, it’s not like we’re going through it for the first time.”
Miscellany from the game, and around the sport:
- Christyn Williams, UConn’s explosive freshman starter who you might remember from her ridiculous game against Notre Dame earlier this season, is totally fine with UConn levels of attention and scrutiny. “Not even gonna lie, I like the attention,” she said postgame, laughing. “It’s definitely different, especially after that game. I just get a lot of DMs — not weird ones, from little girls who look up to me. They’re cute.”
- Crystal Dangerfield’s behind-the-back pass to Katie Lou Samuelson was extremely fun and great — especially because she pulled off the exact same play versus Wichita State a year and a day before.
From February 10, 2018:
From February 11, 2019:
- Oregon absolutely thrashed Stanford on Friday night, 88-48. Sabrina Ionescu was two assists and one rebound away from a triple-double (still, 27 points, 9 rebounds and 8 assists is nothing to sneeze at).
- Notre Dame slid in the rankings after losing to now-No. 20 Miami last week, but pulled off a couple of commanding wins over no. 21 Florida State and Boston College. Arike Ogunbowale is now No. 2 on Notre Dame’s all-time leading scorers list.
Games to keep an eye on this week:
No. 3 Oregon v. No. 9 Oregon State (Friday, Feb. 15, 9 p.m. ET on the PAC 12 Network and Monday, Feb. 18, 9 p.m. ET on ESPN2)
The rivalry here is pretty self-explanatory, but each high-powered offensive team is going to get a chance at home to come out on top. Friday’s game in Eugene is sold out — the energy and the play should both be great, though the way Oregon was able to contain Stanford must look daunting to Oregon State.
No. 7 Maryland v. No. 14 Iowa (Sunday, Feb. 17, 1 p.m. ET on ESPN2)
Last Sunday, Maryland showed off their suffocating defense against Rutgers in a brutal home loss. This Sunday, they’ll have to contain Iowa’s Megan Gustafson, one of the biggest offensive threats in women’s college basketball. She’s currently shooting 70.6 percent from the field. That’s not normal.
No. 5 Mississippi State v. No. 22 Texas A&M (Sunday, Feb. 17, 2 p.m. ET on SEC Network)
What could be more fun than one of the strongest possible SEC matchups also being a revenge game for Texas A&M transfer Anriel Howard?
No. 6 Notre Dame v. No. 12 NC State (Monday, Feb. 18, 7 p.m. ET on ESPN2)
NC State needs to prove that they’re for real in front of a home crowd, and Notre Dame needs a seeding boost after being at the losing ends of two upsets — this one should be interesting.
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