The first question that ran through my mind as I watched the selection show today was: How often does the number one team in the nation not receive a number one seed? Unfortunately, using strictly on-line resources, I was unable to answer this question. Fortunately, a number of columnists had access to more data than I did. The answer is that this hasn't happened since the third year of the tournament, 1984, when Texas was ranked number one at the end of the year and received a number two seed. I still don't know how many polls they were ranked number one in (and even if there was more than one poll at the time). I'm assuming, based on the way the columnists presented this statistic, that this was the only time this situation occurred.
So we're in elite company, apparently. (I guess if there were another team that had to go through this slap on the face, I'm glad it was Texas. Things didn't turn out that well for Texas that year either. They got bounced by number one seed Louisiana Tech 85-60, who ended up getting beat by the eventual winner Southern Cal.)
I've been playing around with other numbers and, based on the seeds that teams receive in the tournament, the Pac 10 is considered by the committee to be one of the weakest of the major conferences. The Southeastern conference gets the most respect with 29 number one seeds, 22 number two seeds, 25 number three seeds, and 14 number four seeds. I came up with a metric (for lack of originality I call it score) to help me better compare conferences. Each number one seed is multiplied by four, number two seed by three, number three seed by two, and number one seed by one and all these numbers are summed. Ranking conferences using this value puts the Pac 10 at fifth. The only other major conference below us is the Big East. (The top four are the SEC, ACC, Big 12, and Big Ten).
I find this hard to reconcile with actual performance. All the talk is about making the final four, so I looked at how well conferences do once their teams reach that plateau. Turns out that the Pac 10 has the second highest winning percentage of any conference (the Big East, based on the strength of Connecticut mainly, is first). Now, granted, only two teams from the Pac 10 have reached the final four: Southern Cal and Stanford. But in nine appearances they managed to win four times. That's got to count for something, you'd think. If we get there, we do well.
Why does it matter, you might ask, what seed a team receives? Well, in the 23 previous tournaments, a number one seed has won 17 times. No team lower than a three seed has ever won (and that only happened twice). In fact, teams seeded lower than four have only made the final four 6 times, and none of them advanced to the championship game. Out of sixty-nine total final four games, teams seeded as a two have won twelve and lost eighteen. Compare that to 47 wins for number one seeds and you begin to see the disparity. In terms of history, it's much more comforting to be seeded number one. But I guess things could be worse. We could've been seeded sixth, like last year, after we won the regular season and the conference tournament.
Looks like the Stanford women are just going to have to go out and prove the mental midgets on the selection committee wrong. On a side note, this is the absolute worst time of the year to be a fan of west coast women's basketball. No matter how exciting the games have been throughout the year, how tight the conference races usually are, how thrilling the conference tournaments - come selection Sunday it becomes all too clear that the committee didn't pay any attention at all.
