By Mel Greenberg
Put together top seed contenders mostly from the same locale, combine with regional sites that will gum up the geography, and then deal with an over abundance of teams from three conferences who are not allowed to meet in the early rounds and one can visiualize a lot of head scratching beginning to take place in that hotel room in Indianapolis where the NCAA women's committee will attempt to at-least identify the field of 64 the next several days before getting into seeding.
By the time the smoke clears Monday night, some mid-major teams are going to back into some pretty good seeds. In fact, once one goes beyond the first seven or eight teams on the "S" curve, a big mass begins to develop.
How weird has it become. One mid-major coach told the Guru her people would be thrilled with a seed range of 10-12 because of the belief they could play with most anyone likely to appear opposite those numbers in the first two rounds of the tournanment.
By virtual of the first-up-gets-the-best-geography concept, Connecticut, projected to be the overall No.1 seed, could end up in a regional in Oklahoma City as easily as one in Greensboro, N.C.
For Friday's exercise, let's just work on the locks and bubble list, the latter of which we will add more teams for comparison sake. The lock list includes the automatic qualifiers or projection as such, even though 12 No. 1 conference seeds have already lost their shot at some March Madness hardware.
On the lock side, we'll list conference afiliation, but will refrain on the bubble side since more teams are being added for discussion.
First the locks (W-automatic qualifier) -- 57 listed
Atlantic Coast _ North Carolina-W, Maryland, Duke, and Virginia.
America East winner -- Hartford projected.
Atlantic Ten - Xavier-W, Temple and George Washington.
Atlantic Sun winner - East Tennessee State-W
Big 12 - Texas A&M, Kansas St., Texas, Baylor, Oklahoma St., Oklahoma, Iowa St.
Big East -- Connecticut-W, Rutgers, Louisville, W. Virginia, Pittsburgh, Syracuse, Notre Dame
Big Sky winner - Montana predicted, but Idaho State is given a shot,
Big South winner -- Liberty projected
Big Ten -- Purdue-W, Ohio State, Iowa
Big West winner -- UCSB predicted.
Colonial winner -- Old Dominion predicted
Conference-USA winner -- SMU-W, UTEP
Horizon winner -- Green Bay predicted.
Ivy winner -- Harvard or Cornell or make it Dartmouth or Cornell
MAAC winner -- Marist-W
MAC winner -- Bowling Green predicted
MEAC winner -- North Carolina A&T predicted
Mid-American winner --Bowling Green predicted
Missouri Valley winner -- wide open
Mountain West -- TCU as projected wrong winner, Utah as wrong loser
Northeast winner -- Long Island or Robert Morris decide Sunday
Ohio Valley winner -- Murray State-W
PAC-10 -- Stanford-W, California, Arizona State
Patriot winner -- Bucknell-W
Southeastern -- Tennessee-W, LSU, Vanderbilt, Georgia
Southern winner -- Chattanooga-W
Southland winner -- Not Texas State, another fallen No. 1 seed
Summitt winner -- Oral Roberts -W
Sun Belt -- Western Kentucky
Western Athletic winner -- Boise State or Fresno
West Coast winner -- San Diego
The Bubbles, including wrong losers that need to be discussed -- Jerry Palm's RPI in parenthesis -- 14 listed, need to cut seven
Georgia Tech (43)
Boston College (67)
Florida State (58)
Nebraska (30)
DePaul (40)
Minnesota (36)
Michigan State (52)
James Madison (44)
Wyoming (38)
Kentucky (54) W-L 15-15
Auburn (60)
Florida (42)
Middle Tennessee (51)
Gonzaga (39)
We'll be on the scene from CAA
-- Mel
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