Unleash Your Inner Hoopaholic: Top 10 Must-Watch Championship Picks For This Year!
Good news for women’s college basketball in general has been terrible for NCAA Tournament underdogs in particular. As public attention keeps rising and more resources keep flowing into the sport, perennial powerhouses have developed around the country, creating a crop of national championship contenders that now goes considerably beyond the roster of old UConn-South Carolina-LSU suspects. This makes for a broader but top-heavy ruling elite .
UCLA, Michigan, Vanderbilt, Minnesota, Iowa, Oklahoma, TCU, West Virginia … the list goes on, and there are 18 teams at least 40 points per 100 possessions stronger than the D1 average, according to our model. But their kinds of talent and depth have not reached anywhere near the bottom of tournament brackets. The standard deviation, or spread, in power ratings among the top 68 women’s teams is 71 percent greater among women’s teams than on the men’s side.
And the results are dire if you’re hoping to see broken brackets. Our upset projection model, Slingshot, estimates that no team seeded 13 or worse has even a 5 percent chance of pulling off a first-round upset this year. That said, women can carry slingshots, too.
In fact, in one possible matchup, Goliath vulnerability, long-shot traits and mis-seeding could combine for greater upset potential than anything we are likely to see in the men’s game. (See our men’s most likely upsets here. ) Here are the top 10 upset odds for the women’s tournament, with special attention to a handful of contests our model thinks most merit your attention.
No. 11 Nebraska Cornhuskers vs. No.
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