Beginning with next year\u2019s NCAA women’s basketball tournament, the top 16 teams will be placed in the bracket in their true ranking regardless of conference affiliation.<\/p>\n
In the past, the top four teams in a conference would be placed in different regions to protect them from playing each other until the Final Four. For example, the tournament this past season had four SEC teams in the top eight overall seeds. Texas was third, South Carolina fourth, LSU fifth and Vanderbilt seventh. LSU was dropped down to seventh and Vanderbilt eighth in the bracketing to avoid having them be in the same regions.<\/p>\n
Now if that happened going forward, the teams would remain where their seeds should have them.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe put a lot of time into establishing those top 16 teams in the order they go in,\u201d NCAA women’s basketball committee chair Amanda Braun said in a phone interview. \u201cYou’re splitting hairs to decide who has the edge and some of that is undone by those principles. To all of us, the work we did and the work those teams did justifies keeping them where they are in that group of 16.\u201d<\/p>\n
The men’s selection committee will still separate out the top four seeds in each conference and put them in different regions.<\/p>\n
The change would potentially only really affect the SEC, ACC, Big Ten and Big 12 as those were the only conferences that had four or more teams in the NCAA field. <\/p>\n
The women’s tournament has started giving financial incentives \u2014 units \u2014 to teams for each round they advance in the tournament the past two seasons. Braun said that it wasn’t brought up at all during the entire week of meetings that the committee had.<\/p>\n
The change comes on the heels of the NCAA expanding its tournament field to 76 teams starting in 2027.<\/p>\n
___<\/p>\n
Get poll alerts and updates on the AP Top 25 throughout the season. Sign up here<\/a>. AP women\u2019s college basketball: https:\/\/apnews.com\/hub\/ap-top-25-womens-college-basketball-poll<\/a> and https:\/\/apnews.com\/hub\/womens-college-basketball<\/a><\/p>\n Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Beginning with next year\u2019s NCAA women’s basketball tournament, the top 16 teams will be placed in the bracket…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":761316,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[272603,4,450,451,3,99,452,453],"class_list":["post-761315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-breaking-news","tag-amanda-braun","tag-breaking-news","tag-breakingnews","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-sports","tag-top-stories","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/761315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=761315"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/761315\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/761316"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=761315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=761315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=761315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}