Let the madness begin.
The 2024 NCAA women’s basketball tournament field has been set, and it has no shortage of star power. Caitlin Clark headlines this year’s tournament as the biggest star in the sport at the collegiate level. USC’s JuJu Watkins is going to have her own shot at stardom this year as the new face of USC basketball. And Angel Reese and LSU are back to defend their national championship.
But while there are plenty of household names, March is the time for new faces to emerge in college basketball. There will be plenty of upsets and many thrilling matchups as teams look to shake up the field. Can anyone keep South Carolina’s perfect season from ending in a title? What about stopping Clark’s Iowa career from being capped off with a national championship? Will anyone prevent a repeat from another strong LSU squad?
Sporting News is rolling out its projection model that evaluates the field and determines which teams are the most likely to come out of each matchup. The model is based on composite ratings from Sports-Reference’s SRS ratings, Omni Rankings, Real Time RPI and Warren Nolan’s ELO ratings. The model then runs a Monte Carlo simulation of the tournament 20,000 times and records the outcomes for each result.
Here is a look at the current…
