Women’s Bracketology 1/30/2025

It’s been a month since I updated my women’s bracketology, so an update was long overdue. In the women’s tournament, there are three important cutoffs to track:

-Who gets the final 1 seed

-Who gets the final 4 seeds (as these teams get to host the first two rounds)

-Who gets the last bubble spots

On the 1 seed front, South Carolina and UCLA are firmly entrenched on the top line. I opted to give the last two spots to Texas and UConn, although USC and Notre Dame deserve hefty consideration. Like last year, UConn has great predictive metrics but the weak Big East is going to put a lid on their seed.

On the hosting front, I gave Oklahoma and NC State the last spots. It seems likely that the Big Ten, SEC and ACC will each have 4-5 teams host.

On the bubble front, things are a bit weird. I have never seen such a clear bubble as this before- the first 40 teams in my seed list (so the 1 through 10 seeds) are very clearly in the tournament, and then there is a tremendous dropoff from that.

One key difference between the men’s and women’s tournament is that the gap between elite teams and bubble teams is much higher in the women’s game. This leads to a lot of power conference teams with good predictive metrics and mediocre records.