Powers remain, threats lurk as Sweet 16 is set
BATON ROUGE, LA. » The Pete Maravich Assembly Center has in its 50 years hosted commencements and concerts, presidential power and a governor’s prayer rally.
It was not until this past weekend, though, that it came within about five minutes of hosting the second-biggest upset in the history of the NCAA women’s basketball tournament.
Then the No. 3 seed Louisiana State surged, 14th-seeded Jackson State sputtered and the tournament, long derided as something of a predictable spectacle, went on apace. But the Southern drama — and the theatrics that emerged elsewhere, in Iowa City and College Park, Md. — showed how the competition can yield stunners, near misses and, as expected, mostly unchecked and unchallenged marches by the sport’s elite toward the Final Four.
And escaping one game is, as ever, no guarantee of surviving the next: LSU lost to Ohio State, seeded sixth, on Monday. The reigning national runner-up went down, too, and Connecticut, which has won 11 championships, nearly did.
“There are enough good players out there that everybody can be successful,” Dawn Staley, South Carolina’s coach, said before the field shrank to 16 teams Monday. “I’m not really surprised by some of the mid-majors being able to upset some higher seeds.”
Starting Friday, the tournament, which began with 68 teams, its largest field ever, will move from the home courts of the top 16 seeds to regional sites in Bridgeport, Conn., Greensboro, N.C., Spokane, Wash., and Wichita. The Final Four will be played in Minneapolis on April 1, with the championship game tipping off there two days later.
But after four play-in games and two full rounds, no one can yet feel fully safe. In fact, for some, the perils are only beginning.
South Carolina, the tournament’s top overall seed, will next face North Carolina, which on Monday pummeled last season’s runner-up, Arizona.
North Carolina State, another No. 1 seed, has a path to Minneapolis that may involve having to beat the Uconn, which is seeking its 14th consecutive Final Four berth but looked shaky Monday, in Connecticut. Louisville could wind up facing South Dakota, which has already ousted second-seeded Baylor and Mississippi, a No. 7 seed.
If Stanford, the top seed in the Spokane region, and Ohio State meet, one bench would include the 2021 champion and the other a program that recently knocked off a title-winning coach’s latest team.
This year’s men’s tournament has the feel of a wide-open frenzy. Four of the remaining teams are double-digit seeds. Some of the sport’s historically great powers — including Duke, Kansas, North Carolina and UCLA — are still in contention.
Gonzaga, the tournament’s top overall seed and the kind of program that seems like it had to have won a title sometime, is pursuing its first one.
The women’s tournament is still chiefly the domain of a narrow slice of Division I basketball. It is not, however, as monolithic as it once was. The last five tournaments have yielded five champions, none of whom shared a conference, moving the sport away from Uconn’s dominant era.
That is helping to fuel greater interest in the tournament, which is enjoying the NCAA’S “March Madness” branding for the first time after the association’s selfinflicted firestorm last year about gender equity in college basketball.