Beginning with next year’s NCAA women’s basketball tournament, the top 16 teams will be placed in the bracket in their true ranking regardless of conference affiliation.
In the past, the top four teams in a conference would be placed in different regions to protect them from playing each other until the Final Four. For example, the tournament this past season had four SEC teams in the top eight overall seeds. Texas was third, South Carolina fourth, LSU fifth and Vanderbilt seventh. LSU was dropped down to seventh and Vanderbilt eighth in the bracketing to avoid having them be in the same regions.
This also had knock-on effects for the pathway out of each region and into the Final Four, as UConn coach Geno Auriemma pointed out when asked about the possibility of facing his former player and assistant coach, Shea Ralph, in the tournament, saying he found it “hard to believe” that the Commodores were merely the eighth-ranked team in the country.
Vanderbilt ended up losing in the 2026 tournament to Hannah Hidalgo and Notre Dame, in a matchup it might not have had with true seeding. (Photo by Stacy Revere/Getty Images)
Now if that happened going forward, the teams would remain where their seeds should have them, keeping a team from being ranked lower than it should be.
“We put a lot of time into establishing those top 16 teams in the order they go in,” NCAA women’s basketball committee chair Amanda Braun said in a phone interview. “You’re splitting hairs to decide who has the edge and some of that is undone by those principles. To all of us, the work we did and the work those teams did justifies keeping them where they are in that group of 16.”
The men’s selection committee will still separate out the top four seeds in each conference and put them in different regions.
The change would potentially only really affect the SEC, ACC, Big Ten and Big 12 as those were the only conferences that had four or more teams in the NCAA field.
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The women’s tournament has started giving financial incentives — units — to teams for each round they advance in the tournament the past two seasons. Braun said that it wasn’t brought up at all during the entire week of meetings that the committee had.
The change comes on the heels of the NCAA expanding its tournament field to 76 teams starting in 2027.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.