New Human-Made Bracket Guess

I've used my puny human brain to craft a new bracket prediction:

This differs from the S-Factor in the following notable ways:

1. The S-Factor favors Creighton and Duquesne to get in, I favor Iowa and Miami to get in. Iowa gets in because they have many more impressive wins than the other three bubble teams I mentioned, despite their February slump. Miami gets in because their best long-ago win (Penn State) is more impressive than Creighton's best long-ago win (Nebraska) and Duquesne's best long-ago win (Delaware). 

2. The S-Factor still has Duke as the #3 overall, a shade ahead of Connecticut. Connecticut will definitely pass them by the time the season is done (they have more basketball left to play than does Duke), and I believe Stanford is a slightly more deserving team of the final #1 due to their win over Baylor.

3. The S-Factor has Gonzaga as a 9 seed. I bumped them up to a 7 seed so that Notre Dame didn't have to play on someone else's home court. I chose to bump high to a 7 rather than low to a 10 because I think it's more fair to make 10 seeds play away games than it would be to make 7 seeds play away games.  Note: this applies to LSU as well, though S-Factor has them in at a 7 seed  anyways.

4.  I think the committee will be a lot kinder to Green Bay (assuming they win out and finish the season with 2 losses) than the S-Factor is. I stuck them in as a 10 in this bracket, but I think if they win out, an 8 seed is their absolute floor and even a 6 seed wouldn't be surprising.

The Case for Duke

In today's bracketology update, Charlie Creme says that the idea of Duke losing its 2-seed will have to be put on hold for now.  I'm going to go one further: why not a 1-seed?

The S-Factor was impressed by Duke's wins over Maryland and Florida State, enough that they are now slotted as the third #1, ahead of Connecticut, the only team to beat the Blue Devils this year.  The S-Factor knows nothing about Chelsea Gray's injury, of course; it only sees a one-loss team, undefeated in the ACC, with five wins over top 25 teams.

Since Chelsea Gray went down, Duke has gone 2-0 against top 25 teams (Florida State and Maryland, on the road, by 16).  This should show the selection committee that Duke is a robust team capable of top-level basketball even without their star point guard. 

Ordinarily this sort of resumé would be strong enough to pencil Duke into the #1 seed, barring a slip-up in the ACC tournament.  But most every source (Creme, the AP poll, RPI, RealtimeRPI's power rankings, pilight's incredible Field of 64 model) puts Stanford ahead of Duke.  Stanford, the most reliable team in past ten years, is once again the odds-on favorite to win the Pac-12. They also deserve accolades for managing to knock off Baylor this year, a feat achieved by no other team since 2011.  Basically their one big knock is that they have now lost twice at the formerly impregnable Maples Pavilion since then (Connecticut and Cal), whereas Duke has only lost once, albeit spectacularly, to Connecticut on the road.  

If the S curve holds out (still a big if), Stanford and Duke will be the #4 and #5 teams and will probably meet in the same regional, which will probably be Spokane.  I don't think there would be a geographic-proximity reward for Stanford.  First, Spokane is 900 miles from Stanford, farther away than Chicago is from New York, though it is true that eastern Washington is probably more familiar with Pac-12 teams.  Second and more importantly, the selection committee hasn't shown a history of artificially boosting Stanford's seed although Stanford usually plays somewhere in the west.  There's no need for that.  Stanford and Duke were 1-2 in the Fresno regional last year, but they were reversed for the much-closer-to-Stanford Berkeley regional in 2009. In the 2008 Spokane regional, an ACC team was number 1, and Stanford was number 2. 



Now in:
LSU
Vanderbilt

Now out:
Iowa
St. Mary's


Conferences with multiple bids:
Big 12: 6
Big 10: 6
Big East: 7
SEC: 7
ACC: 5
Pac 12: 4
Atlantic 10: 4
Missouri Valley: 2
 

Descending Teams

A few weeks ago I took a brief look at the ascendant teams from each conference, teams that had recently demonstrated surprising feistiness.  This post is about the descending teams with the most recent negative movement in the College Women's Hoops S-Factor in each of the big conferences.

Big Ten
Descending team: Purdue

At the beginning of February, Purdue had amassed a 7-1 conference record and was challenging Penn State for the conference lead.  Since then they have lost four out of their last five, most recently to last-place Indiana, and they are now tied for fourth in the conference with two other teams.  The fact that they beat some very good competition in January buoys their rankings and they are more likely than not still going to be in the tournament.





Big East
Descending teams: Rutgers, Georgetown

Rutgers is currently on a three-game losing streak, and Georgetown is on a four-game losing streak. Right now they seem like the ninth and tenth best teams in a conference that will get a maximum of eight teams in.








ACC
Descending team: Miami

Miami has been on a long slow slide ever since the conference season began.  Since the beginning of January, they have yet to put together a three-game winning streak. It's not that Miami has underperformed really -- all six conference losses have come to the teams in the top half of the ACC -- they just have failed to have an unexpectedly good performance against a top team like they did against Penn State way back in November.  Penn State was unquestionably a great win for the Hurricanes, but they have not followed up with another one since then. 




SEC
Descending team: Vanderbilt

For the first time all season, the S-Factor is showing Vanderbilt out of the tournament.  Like Miami, Vanderbilt's conference losses have come against teams in the top half of the SEC, but Vanderbilt has kept failing to impress since their December 16th win against an Oklahoma team playing for the first time without Whitney Hand.  Vanderbilt has four more conference games, and three of them seem like foregone conclusions (Texas A&M, at Kentucky, home against 3-9 Auburn). Tonight's game against Florida in Gainesville seems like it could be a season-changer for the Commodores: win and they're in, lose and who knows.



Big 12
Descending teams: Oklahoma State, Kansas

After writing a post on Monday claiming that the middle six teams fighting for second place in conference would probably not lose games against the Big 12's basement dwellers even on the road, this is exactly what happened a mere two days later to the Cowgirls and the Jayhawks.  Kansas had a real opportunity to build momentum and their first three-game winning streak since early December, but they blew it.  Oklahoma State, which feasted on cupcake teams in the non-conference season, was relying on a winning record in the Big 12 to overcome their poor strength of schedule, but then they unexpectedly lost to sub-100-RPI TCU.  Now both teams have to win 3 out of their last 4 to be above .500 in conference, and I think there's a good chance that a team with a 9-9 record in the Big 12 this year won't make the tournament. 




Pac-12
Descending teams: None
As opposed to the Big 12, nothing unexpected ever happens in the Pac 12.  Stanford's 10-year longest-in-the-nation automatic tournament berth streak is evidence of this boring phenomenon.  As such, there is no tournament-quality team that has suffered any recent unexpected setbacks. Honorable mention goes to Arizona State, which in most seasons is among the top three or four teams in conference but has had a bad year despite the return of head coach Charli Turner Thorne.

Sorting Out the Big 12

The Big 12 is a difficult problem to tackle from a tournament selection standpoint.  Baylor is obviously the best team in the league and has sewn up the regular season. No one else in the league can beat them.  TCU is pretty obviously the worst team in the conference, though Kansas State and Texas are certainly not tournament bound either.  This leaves six teams in the middle who keep failing to differentiate themselves.

It seemed like there was a little bit of distance between the top and the bottom of the pack before this last week.  The top teams were Iowa State and Oklahoma, the bottom teams were West Virginia and Kansas, and the middle was occupied by Texas Tech and Oklahoma State.  This stratification ended this week. The top teams went 1-3, the bottom teams went 3-1, and the middle teams went 3-1.  So now these six teams all have between 5 and 7 losses in conference.

The problem lies in tournament selection. It is not unprecedented for the Big 12 to get 7 teams into the tournament. It is unprecedented for a conference with only ten teams to get 7 teams into the tournament.  There's no rule against having 70% of a conference attend the big dance though, and the tournament selection committee may have a very difficult time justifying excluding one or two teams given the similar resumes of all six.

Assuming all six lose matchups against each other on the road (and also Baylor wherever) and win all matchups against each other at home (and also TCU, Texas and Kansas State wherever), the final standings in the Big 12 will look like this:

1. Baylor (18-0)
2. Iowa State (13-5)
3. Texas Tech (12-6)
4. Kansas (10-8)
4. West Virginia (10-8)
4. Oklahoma (10-8)
4. Oklahoma State (10-8)
8. Kansas State (4-14)
9. Texas (3-15)
10. TCU (0-18)

Given the ease of remaining schedule, Iowa State has the inside track to second place in the conference, but nothing is certain: the Cyclones just lost at Hilton to West Virginia.


____

Now in:
Iowa
Army
Oral Roberts

Now out:
Duquesne
Navy
Sam Houston St.


Conferences with multiple bids:
Big 12: 7
Big 10: 7
Big East: 6
SEC: 6
ACC: 5
Pac 12: 4
Atlantic 10: 3
Missouri Valley: 2
West Coast: 2

A Non-Automated Bracket Prediction

Man, it's been awhile. Move over, S-Factor. Time for a bracket prediction by a human!

Last 4 in: Charlotte, Vanderbilt, Iowa, Washington
First 4 out: West Virginia, St. Mary's, Creighton, Rutgers

Conferences with multiple bids:
Big 12: 6
Big East: 6
Big Ten: 7
SEC: 7
ACC: 5
Pac-12: 5
Atlantic 10: 4


Some comments:
1. Three of the four #1 seeds are Notre Dame, Connecticut and Baylor. No one even debates this.  The fourth #1 seed will go to a winner of one of the other big conferences (Duke in the ACC, Stanford in the Pac-12, unlikely but possibly Penn State in the Big Ten). I chose Duke because I assumed Duke would go undefeated in conference.

2. Anyone who tries to do a bracket prediction and doesn't account for the geographic complexities of first round sites is not doing it right. This year there's a chance for home teams to play at 14 of the 16 sites. I believe Iowa and LSU will get an advantage from the selection committee over other bubble teams like West Virginia and Creighton, even if those other teams have marginally better tournament resumes. 

3. Notre Dame is the only #1 seed that does not host the first and second rounds. Penn State and California are the only #2 seeds that do not host the first and second rounds.  In a typical year, these low seeds would probably be sited on neutral courts rather than on a potential second-round opponent's court, but there are only two neutral courts this year (St. John's Queens, and Ohio State's Columbus). I stuck Notre Dame in Queens, but put Cal and Penn State in nightmare second round scenarios against the home team from Lubbock and the home team from Boulder.  I doubt this will actually occur.

4. San Diego State is not an 11 seed. More like a 13 seed. They got bounced around the most in the name of balanced brackets, no potential intraconference matchups, and geographic necessity.

5. Charlotte gets in because they have a really good chance of going 13-1 in the A10 conference, and they beat St. Joseph's and Duquesne. But they don't play Dayton this year. How do you have 16 teams in your conference and not play at least 15 games, Atlantic "Ten"?  So weird.

Now in:
Charlotte
Toledo
San Diego State
Texas Southern

Now out:
St. Joseph's
Central Michigan
Fresno State
Southern U.

Conferences with multiple bids:
Big 12: 7
Big 10: 7
Big East: 6
SEC: 6
ACC: 5
Pac 12: 4
Atlantic 10: 3
Missouri Valley: 2
West Coast: 2

Automatic Automatics

When the NCAA selection committee sits down in March to discuss which teams will get an invitation to the tournament, 31 teams will already know for sure that they will be in.  In theory we don't yet know which teams will be the 31 that receive automatic bids, as they are determined by the winners of the end of season conference tournaments (with the exception of the Ivy League's bid).  But in practice we can kind of pencil in some of them because they are the teams that seem to dominate the automatic bid year after year (looking at you, Marist and South Dakota State).

Which teams are the most automatic when it comes to automatic bids? I decided to look into the last twelve years of tournament bids to see which teams keep coming back year after year.  I decided (sort of arbitrarily) that a team couldn't be considered dominant unless they won the automatic bid at least half the time over the last few years.  How many years? I didn't know the answer to that. So I looked to see if there was a team in each conference that got the automatic bid at least half the time over the last three years, then over the last four years, then over the last five years, etc. up to twelve years.  Then I counted up the number of times I recorded a teams name (maximum ten) and made a ranked list.  Ties were broken by which team had the longest active streak of getting the automatic bid, then by most recent automatic bid, and then by existence of other dominant teams in the same conference.

(For instance, Arkansas Little Rock, automatic bid recipient from the Sun Belt Conference for the past two years, has therefore won the automatic bid at least half the time in the last three years and four years, for a score of 2. But Middle Tennessee State, automatic bid recipient in 2010, 2009, 2007, 2006, 2005 and 2004, has won the automatic bid in the Sun Belt at least half the time in the last four years, the last six years (3/6), the last seven years (4/7), the last eight years (5/8), the last nine years (6/9), the last ten years (6/10), the last eleven years (6/11) and the last twelve years (6/12), for a score of 8.  Meanwhile, McNeese State has won the automatic bid in the Southland Conference for the last two years as well, but no other team from the Southland Conference has received the automatic bid at least half the time over any of the time scales I looked at.  While both UA Little Rock and McNeese State have an Automatic Automatic score of 2, I would argue that McNeese State would be slightly more likely, based only on past seasons performance and not on anything in this current season, to get an automatic bid than Little Rock because Little Rock faces stiffer competition from another dominant team while McNeese State does not.  Therefore I placed McNeese State higher on the list than Little Rock.)

Anyways, here's the list:

AUTOMATIC AUTOMATICS
Rank. Score - Team - Conference - comment
1. 10 - Stanford - Pac 12 - each year since 2003
2. 10 - Marist - MAAC - each year since 2006
3. 10 - Connecticut - Big East - each year since 2008
4. 10 - UW Green Bay - Horizon League
5. 10 - Liberty - Big South
6. 8 - Tennessee - SEC
7. 8 - UC Santa Barbara - Big West
8. 8 - Middle Tennessee St. - Sun Belt
9. 7 - Bowling Green - MAC
10. 7 - Chattanooga - Southern Conference
11. 6 - South Dakota State - Summit League
12. 6 - Fresno State - WAC
13. 6 - Prairie View A&M - SWAC
14. 6 - Gonzaga - West Coast Conference
15. 6 - Ohio State - Big Ten
16. 6 - Xavier - Atlantic 10
17. 6 - Montana - Big Sky
18. 5 - Hampton - MEAC
19. 5 - Baylor - Big 12
20. 5 - St. Francis (PA) - NEC
21. 5 - Old Dominion - Colonial
22. 4 - Princeton - Ivy League
23. 3 - Duke - ACC
24. 3 - East Tennessee St. - Atlantic Sun
25. 2 - McNeese St. - Southland
26. 2 - Navy - Patriot
27. 2 - UT Martin - Ohio Valley
28. 2 - Samford - Southern
29. 2 - UA Little Rock - Sun Belt
30. 2 - San Diego State - Mountain West
31. 2 - Purdue - Big Ten
32. 2 - Northern Iowa - Missouri Valley
33. 2 - James Madison - Colonial
34. 2 - Austin Peay - Ohio Valley
35. 1 - Maryland - ACC
36. 1 - Sacred Heart - NEC
37. 1 - Utah - Mountain West
38. 1 - Central Florida - Conference USA
39. 1 - Hartford - America East
40. 1 - Vermont - America East
41. 1 - Lehigh - Patriot
42. 1 - North Carolina - ACC
43. 1 - New Mexico - Mountain West

There are a number of problems with this list, as there would be for any list like this.  There are some teams that have changed conferences recently and would now have a 0% chance at getting that conference's automatic bid (Fresno State in the WAC, Utah in the Mountain West). This list also gives the short shrift to the very recently dominant, like Delaware and Florida Gulf Coast. 

What was interesting to me in researching this was that every single conference has had a repeat winner over the last four years, even in the evenly matched conferences like the Missouri Valley and Conference USA.  If the winner of a conference was determined completely by chance, you'd get a repeat winner over four years only about half the time (assuming a ten member conference), not 31 out of 31 times. Only five of the 31 conferences had three different winners over the last three years, something that would happen 72% of the time if it was done randomly. 





Now in:
Eastern Illinois

Now out:
Eastern Kentucky

Conferences with multiple bids:
Big 12: 7
Big 10: 7
Big East: 6
SEC: 6
ACC: 5
Pac 12: 4
Atlantic 10: 3
Missouri Valley: 2
West Coast: 2

Ascendant Teams - Big Conferences

March is a month away, and the conference season continues to weed the good from the bad. Right now there is a vast middle field where teams could either play their way in or out of the tournament.  These are the teams with the most positive movement in the College Women's Hoops S-Factor in each of the big conferences right now. 


Big 10
Ascendant team: Illinois
The Big Ten is one of the more volatile conferences this year.  One can envision plausible paths to a tournament berth for nine different teams (Ohio State is amazingly not one of these nine).  Currently Illinois is the most ascendant team.  Now at 6-3 in the Big Ten, they should be able to manage a 10-6 conference record or possibly an 11-5.  Wins over Georgia and Nebraska should outweigh losses to Bradley and Illinois State. 












Big 12
Ascendant team: West Virginia

The Big 12 is once again the best conference in the NCAA in terms of RPI, and it has the best team in the nation (Baylor).  But what Baylor lacks is an in-conference foil, the Notre Dame to Connecticut, the Cal to Stanford, the St. Mary's to Gonzaga.  In years past this role has been played by Oklahoma or Texas A&M, but Oklahoma is not as strong as in years past (thanks in part to the many torn ligaments in the knees of their players, including Whitney Hand) and Texas A&M is raising hell in the SEC.  Basically the Big 12 is Baylor, then everyone else, then TCU.  The result is that Baylor is currently on something like a 479-game conference winning streak, and those middle eight teams could win or lose on any given night to any of the others. Last week was a particularly good week for West Virginia, which beat both Oklahoma teams to get back into the middle of the Big 12 pack.  Their next four games will either make or break the Mountaineers: at Texas Tech, at Kansas, Oklahoma State at home, and Iowa State at Hilton.  I can see them going 0-4, 4-0 or anything in between.


Big East
Ascendant team: Rutgers
The Big East is similar to the Big 12 in that there is a clear three-way split of the teams ranging from really really good to really really bad. On top of everyone are Connecticut and Notre Dame; below everyone are Pittsburgh, Providence, Seton Hall and Cincinnati; and in the middle are nine teams that could beat or lose to most any of the other teams on any given night.  The most unstable of these teams seems to be Rutgers. The Scarlet Knights have gone 4-1 in their last 5 games, but they managed to let truly-awful Seton Hall hold them to a season-low 42 points in a loss two weeks ago.  Rutgers has a pretty good path to a 9-7 conference record, which would put them firmly on the bubble for the tournament.







Pac 12
Ascendant team: Washington
The Pac 12's chronic RPI deficiency was supposed to be helped out by the addition of Utah to the ranks, but it has been Colorado that has provided the boost the conference has lacked in years past.  Unfortunately, any increase in competitiveness by an improved Colorado has been offset by a lackluster Arizona State and USC.  Right now the Pac 12 is still only getting 4 teams in, but the Washington Huskies have looked strong lately.  They are on a six game winning streak, but their victories have been over the Pacific Northwest's cupcake trio of Oregon, Oregon State and Washington State, as well as Arizona and the aforementioned disappointing Arizona State.  Still, they have a really good shot at going 12-6 in conference (in part because they only play Stanford, Cal and Colorado once).






SEC
Ascendant team: Missouri
The SEC is made up of five great teams (Tennessee, Texas A&M, Georgia, Kentucky and South Carolina), four pretty awful teams (the ones from Alabama and Mississippi) and five middle teams where anything is possible.  Vanderbilt has the best conference record of these teams (5-4) and currently has the best tournament resume, but Florida, LSU, Arkansas and even Missouri, which just Davided the Tennessee Goliath, have reasonable paths to a tournament berth. 












ACC
Ascendant team: none
The maximum number from the ACC in the tournament will likely be six, barring an amazing seven game winning streak by Georgia Tech. Virginia is currently the team out, but they'll probably finish 11-7 in conference and be back in.
















Now in:
Illinois
Gonzaga
Utah State
Eastern Kentucky
Navy
Montana

Now out:
Georgetown
Virginia
Belmont
Seattle
American
Montana State

Conferences with multiple bids:
Big 12: 7
Big 10: 7
Big East: 6
SEC: 6
ACC: 5
Pac 12: 4
Atlantic 10: 3
Missouri Valley: 2
West Coast: 2