If the ESPN women’s college basketball bracketology posting is to be believed, March could bring sadness to the USF women instead of madness. Well, they might be at least a little mad because the current projected field does not include the Bulls.
North Texas – which USF just defeated – is the only American Athletic Conference team in the projected field. Even worse, the Mean Green is slotted as a No. 15 seed and would be sent to Austin to play No. 2 seed Texas on its home court.
Translation: As conferences go, the AAC gets no respect.
Our friends at ESPN also currently project 13 bids going to the Big Ten, 10 to the SEC, and nine to the ACC.
If these projections are even close to accurate, the Bulls probably can’t hope for an at-large bid if they don’t win the conference tournament. They currently are 67th in the NET ranking, which is a metric for selecting at-large teams. Interestingly, they fell two spots from last week despite wins over UTSA and North Texas.
What does that tell you?
While the Bulls have the highest NET ranking among American Conference teams, that might not mean much if they don’t bring home the hardware from the post-season tournament.
They’re being dragged down because the other AAC teams don’t play the non-conference schedule that USF did. While the Bulls challenged teams like UConn and South Carolina, and defeated Duke (currently 8th in the NET rankings), their AAC sisters were fattening up on cupcakes.
Oregon was the only non-conference opponent of note for North Texas (which lost 66-35). UTSA blew past a bunch of tomato cans, and when the Roadrunners did step up to play Texas A&M (77th in NET rankings) they were defeated 55-51.
That doesn’t mean North Texas, UTSA, and a few other AAC teams aren’t good. But it does mean that they under-schedule and that drags the whole league down this time of year.
USF currently sits tied for second in the conference standings, one game behind UTSA. The Bulls, 15-6 overall, seem to be peaking at the right time. They’ve won four straight with eight regular-season games left, and they should be favored in all of those.
If they pull off that stretch run, they would have 23 regular-season wins. But the AAC is held in low esteem by the selection committee, that win total might not matter if the Bulls don’t win the conference tournament.
Yes, it’s only the first week in February and those rankings will shuffle as the month goes on. However, the trend line seems to make it clear what the Bulls need to do to earn a spot in the NCAA tournament.
By the way, the Women's Final Four is in Tampa this year, and guess which school is the host.
Yep. It's USF.