Opinion: Women’s NCAA Tournament promises surprises, exciting runs from deep field
Are you craving chaos? Anxiously awaiting upsets? Then you’ve come to the right place — they call it March Madness for a reason, and the 2021 women’s NCAA Tournament is set up to be one wild, wacky ride.
And that was before Connecticut announced its Hall of Fame coach, Geno Auriemma, tested positive for COVID-19.
Games tip off Sunday, and the tournament promises to be unlike anything we’ve seen. Aside from the fact that all 64 teams will travel to Texas and play the tournament in and around San Antonio — a necessity given the potential rapid spread of coronavirus — this is the most wide-open women’s tournament in NCAA history.
Parity has been growing at an exponential rate over the past few years in the women’s game; keep in mind that powerhouse UConn, the most dominant program in the modern era, hasn’t won a title since 2016.
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In some ways, COVID-19 helped level the playing field even more this season. Gone were the raucous crowds that a handful of schools are known for, fan bases that make it particularly hard to win on the road. Home court advantage, crazy crowd or not, becomes a distant memory when you spend weeks on the road because your county has shut down and you’ve got to move out of town to find an available gym. We saw dominant teams rise this season and typical bottom-dwellers pull off stunners.
And yet, there are teams poised for deeper runs than others, squads that are more likely to still be standing when we get to the Final Four.
The early favorite title game pick will be Stanford and UConn, and for good reason. Assuming Auriemma gets healthy and everyone else stays that way, the Huskies boast the likely national player of the year in Paige Bueckers, who can get a basket pretty much whenever she wants.
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