— The Rise & Fall of Women’s College Basketball Dynasties —
A number of teams that were the titans of the early NCAA women’s basketball tournament have struggled in recent decades. And in their place, a new ruling class of schools has emerged to become the defining programs of the modern age. FiveThirtyEight estimated the team strength over time based on NCAA Tournament seeds as a proxy in the absence of game-level data. To measure this, FiveThirtyEight awarded “seed points” in proportion to a given seed number’s expected wins in the tournament, calibrated to a 100-point scale where the No. 1 seed gets 100 points, No. 2 gets 70 points, and so forth.
The visualization shows the cumulative sum of awarded seed points on a 100-point scale from the very first women’s NCAA basketball tournaments in 1982 until 2018 in comparison to a hypothetical team that participated in all of the 37 conferences and gained half of the points each time (grey line). The curves highlight the fall of yesterday’s women’s basketball powerhouses such as Louisiana Tech, Long Beach State, Southern California, and Old Dominion that have been very good throughout the history of the women’s tournament but have experienced big drop-offs in seed points over the last years. At the same time, schools such as UConn, Stanford, Notre Dame, Baylor, and Duke started slow but picked up steam into the present day. Some teams, such as Tennessee, have been relatively consistent throughout the NCAA era gathering always more seed points than an average team.
Shown are the top 30 college teams that participated in at least ten conferences between 1982 and 2018, sorted by the cumulative sum of seed points.
Data and article by FiveThirtyEight: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/louisiana-tech-was-the-uconn-of-the-80s/
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