(Note: As you'll be able to see, this is a rant that has been building up for almost 20 years. Please forgive the length.)

I am going to write about how USF's Women's Basketball team deserved a Top 4 seed in the NCAA tournament. I will lay out stats that show that only two non-Power team ranked in the RPI Top 16 has ever had a stronger Strength of Schedule and not been a Top 4 seed. But that's not where to start this conversation...

More often than not, when I've ranted over the last 20 years about the major flaws in the NCAA Women's Basketball Tournament selection and seeding process, I'm met with an eye roll and a "who cares?" So it's better to start the discussion of USF's umpteenth screwjob by the committee not with a technical breakdown or analytics, but an answer to the "why you should care" question. Because the root of the problem I am going to discuss is that the general public cares enough about college women's basketball to watch the games, but not enough to muster the energy to hold the power brokers accountable when they run amok. Maybe you are like I was in 1998 - when I first became aware of these issues - and don't know that the University of South Florida is even a school. Maybe you've never watched more than five minutes of women's college basketball in your entire life. So what if the NCAA systematically excludes women's teams outside of the "Power" teams? Maybe you've got enough on your own plate to deal with to care about where USF Women's Basketball is seeded.

So why should you care about the issues I'm about to describe? Because the same underlying issues that beset NCAA women's basketball - incompetence, malfeasance, doing just enough to be seen but not enough to be noticed, becoming so concerned with covering your own butt that you actively harm your workplace, being excessively punitive when issues are brought up - is hardly a problem contained to NCAA Women's Basketball. This is a problem found in classrooms, city halls, churches, hospitals, VA homes, nursing homes, and workplaces all over the country. While the main consequences for USF are being dropped from hosting as a #4 seed to a #6 seed in Tallahassee, the same mentality leads to administrators abusing nursing patients and threatening their families with putting their elderly loved ones in the mental ward if they report the issue. When finances and resources are limited, some people react poorly go out of their way to protect themselves and work with only those who can bring in money, no matter what the ethical cost. Poor leadership tries to solve problems they created by creating completely different problems, often harming others in the process. By not looking the other way way at a smaller version of the problem - the NCAA Women's Basketball Committee's treatment of "non Power" teams, you train yourself to stand up when it becomes a real issue at your doorstep. (If nothing else, standing up for Maria Jespersen now means I may better stand up for a bullied person later.)

When you get a critical mass of that type of person, well, that's when you start seeing what is going on with the NCAA Women's Basketball tournament. I first noticed this issue in 1998-99 while a high school friend played for Virginia Tech's team. They were an A-10 squad back then, and went 26-2 under the direction of Bonnie Henrickson, with a 15-1 conference record (undefeated at home) and losing in the A-10 championship game. They had the second best record in the NCAA with some impressive wins. Despite this, they were seeded 4th in Tennessee's region. I was sad for my friend, whose team would have been a 2 or 3 seed in the men's tournament. When I dug further, it appeared to me that the "non Power" teams were consistently seeded lower than their RPI suggested, regardless of their strength of schedule. When these issues arise in the men's tournament, there are always a couple of talking heads will stand up for the "little guy", which has the added bonus of building their #brand and getting people to care about and tune into their tournament game. Naturally, I expected people to do the same with the women's tournament. I was shocked to find out that nobody mentioned any issues with the seedings at all. Nobody seemed to notice. Nobody had any op-eds or talking points on ESPN. Nobody at the NCAA had to publicly answer for these issues. (Note: I will spare you my rant that has been building for 20 years, but the reporting on this sport is decidedly lacking.)

Which is unfortunate, because women's basketball is a sport that perpetually has potential to captivate the American public. Instead, the leadership and media protect the power brokers in that sport under the guise of "we're all in this together, yay Title IX!" But they do more harm than good to women's sports. By suppressing up-and-coming women's teams and then not generating the buzz for mid-majors that the men's media and leadership does, they contribute to the narrative that there are only a few good teams. As a result, a high school girl who may be a D1 athlete, but may not be good enough to play at UConn or Notre Dame, will be much more easily discouraged than a high school boy who isn't good enough to play for Kentucky or Duke. If you truly want women's sports to grow, you have to give the impression that there is room for growth. Furthermore, not holding the leadership accountable allows other issues to fester, like women's college basketball's referee problem (I can let Jaime or Collin go off on that). But nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care.

Before I do my deep dive into the stats behind the tournament seeding, let me describe two examples of where these poor leadership and lack of oversight become problems. First, the advertising for the women's tournament is terrible. From 1999, when I first got interested, until 2011, not a single ESPN Women's Tournament features a player taking a shot or making a significant basketball move. The ads would actually show them hugging, laughing, dancing, or celebrating at the end of the game. I would get so frustrated by this. You mean to tell me that you claim women's basketball is better because of improved fundamentals, but you won't even show bleeping DIANA TAURASI make a pass or a shot?!? (They would look more often than not like this one from 2005, or this one from 2009 that had a lot of men doing "parkour" and almost no women's basketball. I did find the one in 2011 when the streak was finally broken with a couple of rebounds and a layup at the end. This gives the impression from the sport's leadership that they want to do just enough to be seen, but not enough to be noticed.) When advertising campaigns in other women's sports focus on issues outside of the court, such as attractiveness or race, the covering media raises concerns, and rightfully so. But the NCAA Women's Tournament ran ads that reduced their athletes to giggling and laughing without any meaningful display of their athletic skill for ELEVEN YEARS. But nobody seemed to notice, and nobody seemed to care. Second, in 2016, USF and UCLA were battling for a spot in the Sweet 16. Down 2 with under a minute left, USF appeared to get a stop when the ball appeared to go out on UCLA. The refs called it out on USF, but the call went to replay. The replay very clearly showed the ball go off the hand of the UCLA player. But the refs upheld the call. USF was forced to foul at that point, and the game was over. Now, imagine if that had happened in the men's basketball tournament? Stephen A. Smith and Max Kellerman would have been apoplectic. Discussion of the call would definitely have made the A Block on Pardon the Interruption and Around the Horn. Papi Le Batard would have been making "Hello, Juanito?" jokes on his banana phone. But it's Women's Basketball. Rebecca Lobo only said one sentence in the post-game show about USF at all, and there were no references to the disputed call in any media outlet outside of The Daily Stampede. The "Power" team won, so there was nothing to see. Nobody seemed to notice. Nobody seemed to care.

The primary way that these issues manifest themselves is in the systematic lowering of non-Power teams in seeding. Part of this is the result of regional seeding. But the reason the NCAA does regional seeding is to cut the travel costs they incur. (This is a problem that is only going to get worse. While the NCAA does pull in record revenues, they are also battling seventy concussion lawsuits. Consider the NCAA recently settled one concussion suit for $75 million, you can do the math and see how fearful the NCAA is. This is a classic case of solving a problem you created by creating a completely different problem.)

Here is the breakdown of the NCAA tournament over the past 15 seasons (Seasons before that could not be done because the RPI Nitty Gritty sheets are no longer archived by the NCAA.) They are broken down by the RPI Top 16, 20, and 30 on Selection Monday by "Power" and "Non Power" teams. This shows who moved up into the Top 4 seeds of the NCAA tournament (ostensibly, the best 16 teams) and who went from being a Top 16 RPI team to out of the Top 4 seeds. The RPI is a metric developed by the NCAA to weigh strength of schedule and wins at home and the road. The stat is supposed to weasel out anybody who is filling up their schedule with easy teams to cruise to a big record. In short, the goal of the RPI is produce an objective, unbiased ranking of a team's value. The fact that it is consistently ignored by the committee is rather

The raw numbers are damning. In the last 15 years, only 8 of the 27 teams outside of the P5/UConn ranked in the RPI Top 16 earned a Top 4 seed. None of those teams ranked lower than 11 has ever earned a Top 16 seed. Ever. More teams in the P5/UConn ranked between 21-30 in the RPI on Selection Monday (13) have earned a Top 4 seed than teams from G5 that were already in the Top 16 (8). (California got a 4 seed in the 2009 tournament despite being ranked #31 by the RPI.) In all, 30 teams from the Power schools have moved from RPI #17-30. Of those 30 teams, 11 came at the expense of a fellow Power school, and move up at the expense of a non-Power school nineteen times.

* 218 of 229 of the RPI Top 16 Power teams were Top 4 seeds (95.19%).
* 8 of 27 of the RPI Top 16 non-Power teams were Top 4 seed (29.63%).
* 11 schools ranked from 21-30 by the RPI were Top 4 seeds.
* 248 of 364 (68.13%) P5/UConn teams ranked in the Top 30 of the RPI earned Top 4 seeds.
* 8 of 116 (6.89%) G5 teams in RPI Top 30 earned Top 4 seeds.
* No "Power" school has lost a Top 4 seed to a "non Power" school. Ever.

But an analysis of this lowering in seeding shows that the typical retorts, such as "weak strength of schedule" or "they have a bad loss" don't hold up under scrutiny. Some moves were clearly justified. (Switching BYU and Michigan St. in 2016 was clearly justifiable.) But bumping 2015 Dayton down to a seven seed when Oregon St. earned a Top 4 seed is just absurd. (Not surprisingly, Dayton had to make a relatively short trip to Kentucky.) Simply put, teams that don't appear to be "power" (read: revenue) are almost always moved down.

On the aggregate, the theory that non-Power teams are bumped down because of weak SoS appears to hold up. But, let's remove non-Power five teams with an SoS under 80 (as well as the top SoS team from the Power school that year for fairness, since that team clearly replaced the low SoS team). After comparing the remaining 14 teams in each category, the "they ain't played anybody PAAAUUUULLL" argument no longer holds much water. The rankings and SoS are essentially the same. Certainly not different enough to justify the significant disparity of who moves up and who moves down.

---

So, where does USF's Women's Basketball rank in the all-time NCAA downward movements? Here are the comparative teams in terms of non-Power teams that appeared to clearly earn a Top 4 seed:

2018 USF: RPI 14, SoS 24, Best Win vs #6 Ohio State by 19 late in season. Dropped over Georgia (RPI 26, SoS 51)
2015 Dayton: RPI 13, SoS 33. Dropped in favor of Oregon State (RPI 18, SoS 56)
2015 Princeton: RPI 12. SoS 114, Undefeated, but dropped to an 8 seed.
2010 Georgetown: RPI 13, SoS 50, Dropped in favor of Iowa St. (RPI 29, SoS 50)
2008 Old Dominion: RPI 9, SoS 29, Dropped in favor of Vanderbilt (RPI 20, SoS 24)
2007 Marquette: RPI 14, SoS 22, Dropped to 6 seed in favor of Texas A&M (RPI 23, SoS 48)
2006 Old Dominion: RPI 15, SoS 15, Dropped to 10 seed in favor of Purdue (RPI 21, SoS 59).

Well, the answer to the question lies in how the teams respond in the tournament. 2006 Old Dominion compounded their problem by no-showing their tournament game against George Washington. 2008 Old Dominion rectified this by winning their first two games and then giving UConn everything they could handle in the Sweet Sixteen. 2007 Marquette lost in the round of 32 to Oklahoma. 2010 Georgetown won their first round game by 20 before running into Brittney Griner's Baylor Bears (where she set the tournament record for blocks). 2015 Princeton lost in the round of 32 at #1 Maryland when Maryland pulled away in the second half, but Princeton showed their 8 seed was a joke.

Perhaps the best case scenario for USF is the scenario that 2015 Dayton went through. Criminally underseeded as a 7 seed, Dayton beat 2-seed Kentucky at Kentucky, and then beat 3-seed Louisville by 18 points before falling to UConn in the Elite Eight. Jose Fernandez got his players ready to play when they faced adversity in the past, so we can root for this outcome (and maybe finally getting over the UConn hump as well).

Side note: if NCAA Women's Basketball were competent, they would absolutely be playing up Jose's success at USF. Taking over a team coming of significant NCAA violations, building the program from the ground up, nearly beating UConn several times over the years, and turning down job offers from other schools? You'd think an institution interested in growing their sport would kill themselves for that kind story to sell their sport. Instead, they got dropped for a school that has benefitted from being more than any other school. The teams skipped by UGA to host: USF, Duke, DePaul, Iowa, Buffalo, Green Bay, Missouri, Marquette. This led Collin Sherwin to tweet: Someone once told me an actual excuse they got from a committee member when a very marginal UGA team got in was "it wouldn't be the tournament without Andy Landers."

But nobody else seems to notice. Nobody else seems to care.