Why Fairfield women have opportunity to enter AP Top 25
WOMEN’S BASKETBALL
Monday at noon has become one of the more exciting times of the week for Fairfield University women’s basketball coach Carly Thibault-DuDonis the past month.
It’s then that ThibaultDuDonis and her husband Blake, a Stags’ assistant coach, find the newly-released Associated Press Top 25 poll and check out the rankings.
“We’re basketball junkies in our household,” Carly Thibault-DuDonis said with a laugh on Tuesday. “We constantly pay attention to the national landscape in general. But certainly you look at other teams you’re competing with. Our coaching staff, certainly Blake and I, are keeping tabs on our friends in the business. But you also have added motivation to look at other teams you may be fighting for spots with.”
For four consecutive weeks, Fairfield has found its way into the ‘also receiving votes’ part of the AP poll. The Stags received their first two points, a pair of 25th-place votes, to be a part of the poll for the first time in program history on Jan. 8. They doubled their point total each of the next two weeks and then finished with 13 points in the poll released Monday.
They are third in also receiving votes behind UNLV (21) and Washington State (15). Princeton broke into the Top 25 at No. 25 with 28 points. Fairfield will take a 15-game winning streak, the second-longest in the nation to No. 1 South Carolina’s 19, into Thursday’s Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference game at Rider.
“What we get from it is an ability to use it in recruiting and keep encouraging our kids and our team,” Thibault-DuDonis said. “We want to be in that category. Yes, it’s important for us to win our league but it’s also nice for them to have that national recognition without it affecting our egos by any means.
“We don’t talk a lot about it with our team, to be honest. We focus on the task at hand. But as a coaching staff we’re not naive. When it comes down to March and postseason, and NCAA Tournament, being a ranked team would not hurt our résumé. So we have to continue doing our work in conference to give ourselves a chance to get our best seeding and a chance at an at-large berth, though we don’t want to go in that way.”
Fairfield (17-1, 9-0 MAAC) has a two-game lead over Manhattan in the conference regularseason race. As a conference leader, ESPN’s Charlie Creme lists the Stags as the MAAC’s automatic qualifier in his NCAA Tournament field and has them as a No. 13 seed. In Creme’s bracketology, they would face 2023 Final Four participant Virginia Tech in Blacksburg in a Portland 2 Regional firstround game.
With a NET ranking of 81 and a NET strength of schedule of 335 entering Tuesday’s play, according to the NCAA, Fairfield’s path to the 68-team field will likely go through winning the MAAC tournament title and the automatic bid that goes with it. In Creme’s bracketology, the only at-large berths are going to Power Five conferences and the Big East.
But polls are opinions and the number of AP voters who feel Fairfield should be ranked is growing.
“It’s so much bigger than us,” Thibault-DuDonis said. “We represent a growing university that’s a great place to be. I’m honored we get to highlight being part of an awesome university. And we have a great group of women, and I love the women in our program. They do things the right way, they
FAIRFIELD AT RIDER Thursday, 7 p.m. (ESPN+)
play the right way, they play for each other. What they’ve done to earn this recognition, I’m really proud of them for that.”
There also seems to be a path for the Stags to break into the Top 25 in February.
Of course, it starts with them continuing to win. With the Rider game, Fairfield starts a stretch of five games against the bottom five teams in the MAAC standings. Its next game against a team with a winning record is Feb. 22 at Siena.
UNLV, which has a 30point loss to Seton Hall on its résumé, plays its toughest remaining two games over the next several days. The Rebels (17-2) host Wyoming Wednesday with sole possession of first place in the Mountain West on the line before going to Albuquerque and The Pit to take on New Mexico, which won at UNLV on Jan. 20. A loss in either game could decrease the
Rebels’ point total in the poll significantly.
Washington State, meanwhile, was boosted this week by Sunday’s upset of then-No. 2 UCLA. But the Cougars (15-6) have as tough of a four-game stretch coming up as anyone in the country as they host No. 6 Colorado Friday and No. 20 Utah Sunday before going on the road to take on Cal-Berkeley Feb. 9 and No. 4 Stanford Feb. 11. They may also have to go through the stretch without their best player Charlisse Leger-Walker, who suffered a non-contact knee injury in the UCLA contest. On Tuesday, she pulled out of her native New Zealand’s Olympic qualifier Feb. 8-11 in China. If Washington State can go 2-2, that could strengthen its poll position. A 1-3 or 0-4 stretch will see it drop.
Then there’s Princeton (15-3). The Tigers’ schedule is favorable as they appear to be the class of the Ivy League. They do play one of three teams tied for second in the league, Brown, twice in a two-week span starting Saturday in New Jersey.