Pac 10 Tournament Chances

The Pac 10 tournament is down to the semifinals. Arizona will face top seeded Stanford, while California will face second seeded UCLA. As for the Pac 10's third and fifth seeds, they lost last night. Layshia Clarendon of California had 46% of her teams points (22) as the Bears beat third-seeded Arizona State 48-43. Senior Ify Ibekwe got a double-double and was one of three Wildcats to score in double figures as Arizona took down USC 72-61.

The rest of the Pac 10's tournament prospects break down like this. Most bracketologists put Stanford in the tournament as a No. 1 seed and UCLA in as a No. 2 or No. 3 seed.

The third place finisher in the regular season, Arizona State, has looked really bad recently. But it would be hard to deny a team that finished 11-7 in conference with an RPI of 39 and a victory over DePaul earlier in the season, despite the fact that in three of their last five games they have been unable to score more than 50 points.

USC has had a relatively high RPI for most of the season, but the glory days of 2010 led to a disappointing conference season in 2011. And 10-8 in the Pac 10 is about equivalent to 7-9 in the Big 12. They needed to at least get to the semis to have a decent shot at the NCAA Tournament.

California, at 7-11 in conference, lost way too many games that they should have won, and so an at-large bid is probably not in their future.

Three teams may be all the Pac 10 gets. But the College Women's Hoops S-Factor now puts Arizona in the NCAA tournament as an at-large bid for the first time since January 6, 63 days ago! (Check the chart out). No other team with a predicted at-large bid even comes close in terms of most time spent below the at-large line after having been above the line previously (Kansas State's 38 days in purgatory is second). And of all the non-Stanford, non-UCLA teams in conference, Arizona has had the best run over the last month, winning eight out of their last nine games. Which is a huge turnaround from having gone 2-7 in the nine games previous to that. They are peaking at exactly the right time.

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Now in: Arizona
Now out: Southern California

Conferences with multiple bids:
Big East: 10
Big 12: 7
ACC: 6
Big Ten: 5
SEC: 4
PAC-10: 4
Atlantic 10: 2
Colonial: 2
Mountain West: 2