What to watch for in Monday’s selection committee reveal
For the second straight Sunday, favorites fell in bunches, wreaking havoc in women’s Bracketology land.
Five teams that were either in the previous projection’s top 16 or just outside of it lost on Sunday. That comes just a week after seven ranked teams fell victim to unranked opponents.
It has been a wild couple of weekends, and they arrived just in time for the NCAA women’s basketball selection committee’s second and final reveal (halftime of Big Monday’s UConn-South Florida game, 7 p.m. ET on ESPN2/ESPN App) of the top 16 seeds this season.
The committee’s job got much more difficult after losses by DePaul, Florida State, Kentucky, Arizona and Texas A&M. Here are the top 16 in this week’s projection, and some of the biggest questions that plagued the process of putting this week’s bracket together:
Top 16:
1. South Carolina
2. Oregon
3. Baylor
4. Maryland
5. Louisville
6. UConn
7. Stanford
8. Northwestern
9. UCLA
10. Iowa
11. NC State
12. Mississippi State
13. Indiana
14. Gonzaga
15. Arizona
16. Oregon State
This is always the first pressing question. Every school wants to know if it is in the driver’s seat to host first- and second-round NCAA tournament games. The upsets and upheaval of the past two weekends make the answer more intriguing. Oregon State and Indiana, teams that emerged from Sunday in the top 16, weren’t there last week. DePaul and Texas A&M fell out.
How will the NCAA women’s basketball selection committee view Texas A&M, which suffered three of its seven losses with leading scorer Chennedy Carter out with an ankle injury? She’s back and initially seemed to make a difference for the Aggies, but they have now lost two in a row with Carter.
Arizona really struggled in a loss to Colorado without its best player, Aari McDonald. She came back, and the Wildcats stunned Stanford. That would have made the loss to the Buffaloes easy to excuse, but then Arizona lost to Cal with McDonald.
How will the committee view that kind of inconsistency, or the fact that the Wildcats’ RPI is merely 27? Could it cost the Wildcats a spot? I say no, but that answer would have been different had DePaul not lost its past two, or Florida State gone 2-3 in its past five, or Kentucky not lost to 14-15 Vanderbilt.
I constructed and then debated three different versions of this week’s bracket. Each had the Huskies in a different region. Theoretically, all could work. The final version with UConn in the Dallas Regional offered the best combination of keeping with the bracket principles and balancing the competitiveness of each region. That doesn’t mean the committee won’t see it differently.
With five Pac-12 and four Big Ten teams in the top 16 of this week’s projection — and bracketing rules that restrict the placement of teams that are among the top-four seeds from the same conference in the same region — the flexibility for placing teams in the bracket is limited. Add to that the NCAA’s historic desire for teams that can drive to a regional site (fewer than 350 miles from campus) — which for this season’s purposes means Louisville in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and NC State in Greenville, South Carolina — and the Huskies become one of the only teams among the top 16 that the committee can move around to make it all work.
Having UConn in the Greenville Regional follows the geographical slant that the committee has placed on the S-curve in recent years. That is the closest regional to Storrs, Connecticut. It’s also the one that creates the most imbalance among the regions. Pairing the No. 1 overall team with the No. 6 team ultimately made Greenville the most difficult regional by a wide margin. UConn in the Portland Regional did the same. In Dallas, the Huskies are paired with their natural S-curve partner, Baylor (No. 6 and No. 3 overall, respectively).
With no Albany or Bridgeport regional as in seasons past, the Huskies are going to have to get on a plane for the regionals regardless of where they are placed, so whether it’s Greenville or Dallas shouldn’t particularly matter this season. The first clue as to how far that flight might be comes with Monday night’s reveal.
The Zags were a No. 3 seed in the first top-16 reveal from the committee and are currently No. 10 in the RPI. That would suggest them also making it in this time. However, since the Feb. 3 reveal Gonzaga hasn’t played a team ranked in the RPI’s top 100. The Bulldogs also lost to No. 197 St. Mary’s, and the Zags found out they would be without senior sharpshooter Katie Campbell for the rest of the season due to a knee injury.
Those would all be legitimate reasons if the committee decided to leave Gonzaga out of the top 16. And, in fact, what might ultimately keep the Zags in position to host first- and second-round NCAA tournament games has nothing to do with them at all, but rather the losses suffered by the other contenders. Had Texas A&M, DePaul and/or Kentucky not lost on Sunday, or if Missouri State hadn’t stumbled on Thursday against Illinois State, Gonzaga might already have been left out. Now it seems impossible that the committee won’t include the Zags in the top 16.