We began our search for potential upsets in the women’s NCAA Tournament by establishing basic power ratings for all D-I teams. Now that we have matchups, we can start figuring out which squads could emerge from their first-round collisions intact, and which are likely to have their seasons wrecked long before midnight strikes at the big dance.
Even a cursory look at the gaps between women’s tournament favorites and underdogs reveals grim news for would-be Cinderellas: while superior talent is gradually spreading throughout the women’s game, it hasn’t yet reached the lower ranks of the field of 68. Even if you set South Carolina aside for a moment as an outlier in dominance, our statistical model says the difference between No. 2 Stanford and Sacred Heart, the weakest team whose name was called on Selection Sunday, is a staggering 63.7 points per 100 possessions. That’s the equivalent of the difference in the men’s game between Houston and the No. 361 Green Bay Hawks, who just went 3-29 in the Horizon League. Top-three seeds in the women’s tournament have gone 335-1 since 1994 in the first round. (Yes, the one was Harvard in 1998. Some stories never get old.) This recalls the old statistician’s quip: Nothing is standard about that deviation!
So while we yield to…
