Owls settle for WNIT bid after C-USA tourney loss
The NCAA women’s tournament selection show came and went Monday night, and Rice wasn’t among the 64 teams in the field.
Instead, the Owls (18-4) accepted a bid to the Women’s National Invitation Tournament, where they will play Arizona State (11-10) in the first round at 11 a.m. Friday in Fort Worth.
The Owls were on most projected brackets heading into Saturday’s Conference USA championship game against Middle Tennessee. ESPN’s Charlie Creme even had them as a No. 11 seed in his updated projections before that game.
However, as most projections included Rice as a lower seed with an “automatic qualifier” tag, a win in the CUSA title game seemed necessary to ensure a spot in the NCAA Tournament.
In losing to the Blue Raiders 68-65, the Owls put themselves squarely on the bubble and into the hands of the selection committee. Ultimately, the title game acted as an NCAA play-in game, and the Owls didn’t make the cut.
It didn’t matter that Rice had just four losses on the year, including one by just four points to the Mercado Region’s No. 2 seed in Texas A&M. It didn’t matter that the team managed to win eight of its last 11 games following a four-week layoff due to COVID-19 issues in the program.
What seems to have mattered most is where the Owls ended the season in the NCAA’s NET rankings, which were used for the first time by the selection committee. They replaced the RPI metric system, with the shift mirroring that of the men’s tournament selection committee in 2018.
“A really exciting time for NCAA women’s basketball. A historic move,” Division I women’s basketball committee chair Nina King said in an interview with women’s college basketball reporter Autumn Johnson in January. “We had been using RPI as a metric for a very long time, and so this is really exciting to be able to move into a new contemporary sorting tool, and that’s exactly the NET.”
Rice finished the year at No. 65 in the NET rankings, meaning it was likely among the teams considered for atlarge bids. But with some teams lower in the NET awarded automatic bids as conference tournament winners, the Owls were on the outside looking in.
Now, their attention turns to the WNIT.
For the first time since 2006, the tournament bracket has only 32 teams because of the COVID-19 pandemic. As a regular-season champion that didn’t make the NCAA field, Rice was one of nine automatic qualifiers for the WNIT.
In the Owls’ most recent WNIT appearance in 2018, they beat Texas State 71-60 in the first round before bowing out in the second in a 93-73 loss to New Mexico.
It isn’t the ideal postseason opportunity for the Owls, who were undefeated and looked like the best team in their conference as late as Feb. 21. But it’s a chance to continue playing nonetheless and gives star center Nancy Mulkey at least one more game in a Rice uniform.