There is not a sober human on the planet who watched the first round of the women’s NCAA tournament and thought: “This event needs more teams.” The gap between the best teams and the pretty good ones is wide enough to raise antitrust concerns, not that college sports need more lawsuits.
Some first-round highlights: South Carolina won by 60. UConn won by 69. Duke won by 61. Notre Dame won by 52. LSU won by 55. USC held UNC-Greensboro to single digits in all four quarters and won 71–25. Come on: 71–25 is not a basketball score. It’s a third-grade math problem.
Oh, sure, Vermont put a little scare into North Carolina State, but the Catamounts still lost by 20. That will be a great story for the Catamounts to tell their grandkids someday, as long as they hide the box score. No. 13 seed Liberty did nearly beat No. 4 seed Kentucky, but that was only because of a late flurry, and also: So what? Liberty still lost.
Whether this is a problem for the women’s game is an interesting question, but one thing it is not is new. Last year, 31 of the top 32 seeds won their first-round games. Since 2012, teams seeded 13th or lower are 1–192. (We are not counting First Four games when a No. 16 beats a No. 16.)
The only reason to expand the women’s tournament is because the NCAA might expand the men’s tournament, which is also a bad idea, though not quite as bad. The NCAA presumably does not want to be accused of favoring the men over the women, something it has been caught doing, oh, pretty consistently for its entire existence. So how about leaving both tournaments at 68, and dropping the topic for another decade?
For various reasons, the women’s tournament should feature more upsets than ever before. There is more talent than there has ever been. Today’s players grew up knowing that it was possible to make a living playing professional basketball, which should draw more elite athletes to the game. As a commercial product, the game is booming.
Men’s and Women’s NCAA Tournament News, Features and Analysis. dark. More. SI March Madness
So why is there such an extreme difference between the haves and the sort-of-haves? All theories are welcome, but here is one: Name, image and likeness monetization is having the opposite effect in women’s basketball that it has had in football.
Whether they are in high school or enter the transfer portal, many football players auction their services to the highest bidding NIL collectives. This makes it harder for teams to hoard talent the way Alabama did for so many years under Nick Saban. Ten years ago, there were not many (legal) football reasons for a player to choose Mississippi State or Indiana over LSU and Ohio State. But with an open marketplace, schools with passionate and wealthy boosters can overcome their own spotty football history.
In women’s basketball, the stage at UConn or South Carolina is still so much brighter than almost anywhere else. Four of the top six players in the 2022 HoopGurlz rankings play for UCLA and the other two play for UConn. Lisa Bluder did a fabulous job at Iowa, but Iowa broke through because Caitlin Clark is from the state and wanted to stay there.
If the NCAA held this tournament 100 times, the top five teams (South Carolina, UCLA, USC, Texas and UConn) would probably win at least 95 of them.
The good news is that this is probably not a long-term trend. More programs will try to procure elite talent for the same reason the WNBA and NWSL are growing: The product is great and there is a market for it. Already, you can see top recruits choosing schools they would not have previously considered. The gap between the No. 3 seeds and the No. 7 seeds in this tournament is probably not that big.
It will just take some time before the game is really 68 teams deep. The schedule says the 2025 women’s tournament began Friday. It really begins now.
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