NCAA women’s basketball preseason bracketology: Mapping Notre Dame’s road to a repeat

Pat yourself on the back. You made it through another torturous offseason. Your reward? Some wild, borderline foolish speculation about a tournament nearly five months away based on a season that hasn’t even begun.

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That’s right, above you will find our complete preseason 2019 NCAA Tournament bracket projection.

The 1 seeds are more or less predictable. We can quibble about the order, but that will be sorted out soon enough anyway. Oregon got the edge over Louisville as the final 1 seed because Sabrina Ionescu and Ruthy Hebard are two of the best players in the country and have two years of experience under their belts. If you wanted to put Baylor, Oregon, and Louisville in any order, however, I wouldn’t fight you on it. There’s simply no 2018-19 data to go off of yet.

As for the defending champs, Notre Dame will be the favorite to get back to the Final Four out of the Chicago region, but don’t expect it to come easily. Texas is a tough 4 seed to draw in the Sweet 16, and if seeds hold in this fictional bracket, a game against Stanford could be wild. The Cardinal finished last season red-hot and are riding all sorts of momentum into 2018-19. And that’s assuming they get past 3 seed Georgia in their Sweet 16 game — not a sure thing either.

The bracket gets even more interesting near the bottom of the at-large pool. At one point or another, I had probably four different teams filling out that last at-large spot. Ultimately, I rolled the dice on Auburn. It’s a risk, as the Tigers finished below .500 last year, but they return their top three scorers and have a coach in Terri Williams-Flournoy who has reached the tournament five times. Oh, and they enroll two top-40 recruits in Robyn Benton and Brooke Moore.

There’s a lot to fight about in here, so please direct all your criticism to literally anybody else on staff.

Methodology:

In case you missed it, I attended the NCAA’s mock tournament selection exercise in Indianapolis this summer and came away with a whole new way of going about this insane process. I did my best to stick to it here, but with no data to work off of, I had to take a few liberties. Here’s how I tackled this:

Each automatic bid has, for now, been given to the preseason conference favorite. Once conference season gets underway, that will change to the first-place team at the time
To determine at-larges, I looked at two things: What other people are saying about them (where they fall in preseason top 25 and conference polls, where fellow High Post Hoops staff have ranked them, etc.) and how I view their odds this year. I formulated my opinions based on what a team brings back, what they lose, and what they enroll.
Past tournament performance has not and has never been a factor in seeding.
Similar to the committee’s process, I did my best to avoid regular season and previous tournament rematches in the first two rounds. Let me know if I missed anything!
Once I seeded every team, they were placed into the bracket in order, based on geography, as detailed in the story I linked to above.

Procedural notes:

DePaul cannot be placed in the Chicago regional
South Carolina is hosting the first weekend of the men’s tournament, so for now, it looks like the Gamecocks will not host even if they are a top-four seed. At least until they announce any alternate plans. That is why you see Raleigh (5 seed NC State) as the host of that pod.
Nebraska was bumped from a 7 to an 8 seed and West Virginia from a 8 to a 7 in order to avoid first-weekend conference matchups.
This is also why Virginia Tech was moved from a 9 seed to a 10 and Duquesne from a 10 to a 9.

Other teams considered:

This is in no particular order: UCF, Houston, Kentucky, USC, Indiana, Ohio State