Women’s Conference Tournament Recap & NCAA Tournament Projections (Premium)

The top seeds made their mark over the last three weekends with 21 of 30 conference tournament winners having a 1 in front of its name.  The only conference that didn’t have a conference tournament was the Ivy League. Dartmouth finished in a three-way tie with Cornell and Harvard but the Big Green got the nod via a tiebreak. There were 18 repeat champions with only Vanderbilt and Furman able to win the tournament on its home court. The longest shot to win a conference tournament was South Florida. The Bulls entered the AAC Tournament as the No. 7 seed but they knocked No. 10 Temple, No. 2 Tulane, No. 3 SMU, and then No. 1 Tulsa to win the title.  Down below I have the breakdown by seed along with the list of each conference champion. 

Conference Tournament Champion Breakdown (by seed):

#1. 21 (Alabama State, Denver Furman, LIU-Brooklyn, Louisiana-Monroe, Missouri-Kansas City, North Carolina, Ohio State, Pepperdine, Quinnipiac, Rice, SIU-Edwardsville, South Carolina State, Stanford, Texas Tech, Texas A&M Corpus Christi, Vanderbilt, Wichita State, William & Mary, Winthrop, Youngstown State)

#2. 6 (Boston U, DePaul, Idaho, Massachusetts, North Florida, UC Santa Barbara)

#3. 2 (Buffalo, San Jose State)

#7. 1 (South Florida)

So we’ve seen the 31 automatic qualifers now let’s take a look at those 33 at-large bids that will be awarded tomorrow afternoon at 5:30 p.m. ET. 

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The at-large bids have always been awarded based off the final ITA rankings of the regular season which were completed last night but won’t be published until this Thursday. The NCAA committee also used the rankings for seeding as well with the only real deviation coming when two adjacent teams played during the season. In some instances a head-to-head win made a team jump the team it beat though in other instances it did not. If you haven’t already checked out my rankings projections for this week they are available on the rankings tab in the menu – I have both the first and second runs listed side-by-side so you can compare them. The second run of the rankings is down below with automatic qualifiers noted with an AQ and the cut-off line highlighted in yellow. 

The final at-large selection this year is No. 40 since we had 7 conference champions ranked inside the top 40. Tulsa happens to be the team ranked No. 40 so even though they got surprised by South Florida in the final of the AAC Tournament they’ll still be heading to the dance. Florida International was the first team out while Oklahoma and Harvard were the next two out since both Alabama and Virginia had sub .500 records. 

Grid Broken Down By Seed Bands (for mobile viewing turn sideways)

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