The ACC got 8 in in 2013 and all 8 made the sweet 16. 6 made the elite eight and 3 made the final four. That was a crazy year. Hard to argue with those kind of results.
I heard this same chest-thumping from ACC homers in 2013 "Woohoo, we got all four 1-seeds" "Yeahh ... we won so much against this and that team from conference # 29, #28 et al" With all those stats you mention, can you please identify who won in that Tournament? People forget what a tournament is about. A Tournament is not about to brag who and how much from this-ad-that conference got in. A Tournament is held to identify a winner. Bottom-half teams need not apply, nor do they deserve entry. Right now, the barriers to entry to the dance for bottom-half teams from the Pac, ACC, SEC, are very very very low. Win your conference or finish in the top half. If that's so hard to do in your conference, you don't deserve to get in.
UCLA won a great tournament. I’m betting whichever club was left out of the tourney for the 8th ACC team to make the sweet sixteen would not have. There are good reasons to look to redistribute how teams are allowed into the tournament: either to manufacture parity or because you believe the best teams are being left out. Making an arbitrary distinction on a conference cutoff will only punish the conferences with the best teams.
??? Regional seeding? Where did that come from? You must be thinking of some other sport, since I think some do have a regional approach. But not women's soccer. It sounds like you don't want the best teams in the tournament, but rather want not only for each conference to have one team in it (filling almost half the field), but also want each conference to have more.
I really don't understand the "logic" here. Are you believing that worthy mid majors are being left out of the tournament in favor of less deserving P5s? Which teams exactly? I remember a couple years ago everyone being upset because Wisconsin didn't make it. I don't remember much about mid majors not making it, (Marquette maybe?) but perhaps I just didn't hear this. What examples do you have with their stats to suggest a midmajor was improperly excluded in favor of a P5? I mean, there is a committee that is supposed to look at ALL the at large potential teams and chooses which ones to let in. I know they don't simply look at RPI. The point being that some subjective quality control is already built into the system. I personally think that taking so many conference tournament winners as an automatic should be the question revisited. Some of the first round games are ridiculous. Are there some conferences in which their automatic bids have NEVER won an NCAA tournament game. Or maybe a better time frame reflecting the current environment, is in the last 10 years? If the real problem is indeed some bubble midmajors are being hurt by their schedule, then I think they should toss out the sure loser automatic bids (let's say RPI less than 80 or something) and instead include more bubble teams. If a midmajor team thinks they have a shot at advancing within the tournament in the coming years, why don't they buff up their preseason schedules to improve their RPI? They should tehn specifically schedule bottom half P5 teams to show "meaningful wins". They are not helpless to improve their chances and at the mercy of a weak conference.
Doesn't this discussion about seeding all boil down to the conundrum of wanting your cake and eating it too? One pole in this discussion taken to its extreme is that every school should have a shot at the championship. Right now this sentiment is being expressed as mid majors being excluded from the DI dance. The logical extension of this thinking would be to have a monstrous 8+ round tournament where every DI school could sign up if they wished. (Of course the complaining about seeding would make the current grumbling look like child's play.) The other pole in this argument is that only the best teams should be playing each other in the tournament. At this point this is the general objective, but the same squabbling is the result with fears that the a deserving team isn't being left out. Recall that in the 1950s all colleges were assumed to be equal and recruiting was not the huge issue it is today. Those were the days when the soccer teams of some small schools (eg Quincy, Westchester, Earlham, Haverford, Hartford, and others could go toe to toe with the big guys such as Indiana, Penn State, Nortre Dame, St Louis, etc. (Kinda like Lacrosse is yet today.) But then recruiting started to get serious and those with bigger budgets started to dominate and so the result by the late 1970s was the three divisions (DI, DII, DIII plus the NAIA) So we now have the three divisions (4 with the NAIA or 5 with JUCO) to give more schools the chance at a national trophy. Is the argument that we should have 4 divisions (one for the mid majors), but then why not 5, 6, or 8 in the NCAA to give everyone a better shot? All this being said, what we have now in DI seems to be a good compromise trying to select the 64 most deserving teams. It's not perfect, but I believe that people of good will are working at it as best they can. There will always be grumbling.
oleliga, to your point about whether or not "deserving" mid-majors are being bumped out of a spot by P5 teams, I can't say for sure. The current system utilized to compare apples to oranges is imprecise. When looking at these ratings systems, the vast majority tend to look at it linearly, as to say, ha i'm rpi 37 I'm better than rpi47. Whereas people with an analytical background will tend to look at these teams in clusters. My observation is that teams in the rpis of late 30s - early 50s belong to the same cluster, and as such, comparable perhaps competitive in a neutral ground. This is my observation. Others may look at it differently, but it is mine. This cluster is significant as the crux/debate of selection/elimination for at-larges are teams in this cluster. Invariably, P5 teams in this cluster will "shine" as they have a better resume. Whereas, mid-majors may not shine as well as they have not played high-rpi teams. I make this observation with Pac teams in mind. They will have annual games with four California teams perennially ranked in the Top 30 - that's the shine. When you look at their NC schedule, it's nothing to brag about. As a result of playing weaker regional teams, they will get to the required 0.500 record to be eligible, and also have the shine - hey I played/lost to 4 top 30 teams. I do realize that the vast majority of Pac teams face geographical isolation. As a result, it is expedient to play teams in their backyard/region, many of whom are in the sub-200 cluster. Even Stanford play into this trap, playing the UC Davises and USFs of the world It is, however, an effective strategy of attaining Tournament eligibility for bottom-half Pac teams, I suspect for other P5s as well. My suggestion of finishing in the top half of your conference effectively nips this gaming of the system. No longer will you pad your record to get to 0.500 with patsies, you need to win within your own conference as well. To upprv's point, the requirement to finish in the top half of your conference might tip the recruiting balance, at least in the West . The Portlands, Idahos, and the Gazongas of the world can confidently tell an in-state recruit that she has a better chance of sniffing a playoff run with them than with signing for the Pac state school. I tend to agree with olelaliga's point of automatic qualifiers to be reevaluated. To me, a simple change in nomenclature is all that is required to redress this issue. No longer will it be called Round 1, rather it's a play-in round, or in UEFA parlance, a qualification round. You don't have Spanish champion Barcelona take on the league champion from Malta in the early rounds. The league champions from Malta, Moldova, Faroe Islands, etc. winnow each other out in qualification rounds. Similarly, in the NCAA, have the vast majority of conference champion automatic qualifiers eliminate each other to get to the 32-team tournament, which will be the new and improved NCAA Tournament.
But NCAA doesn't give two hoots about fielding the best athletic competition. That's not NCAA's job, purpose, nor niche in either the education, sports, or entertainment worlds. NCAA pretty much just manages inter-school competitions that already exist(ed). If they advocate anything, it's broad participation in the context of fun activities before graduating with a degree. So they'll always tend to maximize participation, not ruthlessly winnow to create the strongest tournament field. They're not a pro talent organization, nor a scout for one, and they don't care about being a minor league for one. (The massive growth in TV $$ for certain college sports was not predicted or intended by NCAA, and they're just surfing that wave today.) Your set-up is, indeed, perfect for pro clubs and nat'l teams who do want to find the best pro champion. It hard-codes asymmetry of inconvenience to reflect the real-world cold fact that some clubs are just more important than others. NCAA espouses the other extreme: it goes out of its way to maintain the polite illusion that all schools are equal under the umbrella. Everybody gets to dream the same dream. If this ensures that it's sub-optimal as an athletic competition, then so shall it be. Equality of dream overrides asymmetry of status. So you can't just try to optimize it strictly as a competition. There are more considerations in NCAA's mandate than that.
For last weekend, I see these as the most significant upsets: Illinois over Duke Fairfield over Hofstra Villanova over LSU Oregon over Clemson
There is a site--or was last year--that publishes the results of every game. Does anyone know what it is--I can't seem to find it now.
Top Draw Soccer https://www.topdrawersoccer.com/college-soccer/college-scoreboard/women/divisionid-1#5 NCAA https://www.ncaa.com/scoreboard/soccer-women/d1 Both are fairly slow with the updates though.
The All White Kit College Women's Soccer Schedule is the site you want, by the next day it will have all scores posted and will have some posted same day; and if you navigate around the site you'll find a wealth of information.
TRIVIA: Counting the Thursday games as part of "this weekend's games," I count 281 D1 women's games this weekend.
Watching the UCLA-PSU game and I am surprised UCLA has not received a couple red cards yet, a couple of really late dirty fouls.
We got the W, that's all that matters and we were missing key players. I'm sorry that we were a little rough in this particular game, that's not normally our style.
I was shocked as I have never seen UCLA play so overtly physical, maybe the Canadian getting hurt had something to do with it, but it was dangerous.
I'm not sure UCLA deserved any red cards: I saw three plays that resulted in yellows, but I wouldn't have given a red card for any of them. Maybe I missed one? As for the game, two good teams, of course, but thought the Bruins were the better team today--even playing without Mace and Fleming (for the 2nd half). Game was a bit sloppy but UCLA is very hard to play what with their excellent possession style. Pa. State has some top-class defenders, so I was surprised that the centerbacks and keeper gave the ball away in their defensive third more than a few times in this game, especially in the first half--with one of them resulting in the Sanchez goal. That was a class strike by Sanchez after she retrieved the ball--I though she had a very good game. The UCLA centerbacks don't look terribly quick and almost got exposed a couple of times early in the game but they settled in and overall it as a pretty solid defensive effort by the Bruins, though they also gave away a goal on a poor clearance that turned into a penalty in the box and then a penalty kick. The 2nd UCLA goal was a bit of bad luck for Pa. State, but then the keeper could have deflected the ball over her goal but decided instead to catch it while falling back into goal. What's interesting is that, not long before that, she did the same thing on a ball sent in on her goal--I think it may have been a UCLA corner, and she was close to being behind her line when she caught that one, too.
Florida has lost back to back games, to Ohio State and Oklahoma St., by 0-1 scores--and have not got UCLA, Southern Cal and Florida State next on the schedule. Yikes....
You have to be crazy to be a goalkeeper-- how many bad passes or mistakes do forwards, middies, and defenders make? How many knuckle-headed corners have I seen defenders create? A GK has to be pitch-perfect or its a goal. Your best goalkeepers always want to secure the ball, Amanda Dennis did that and in this one instance it was the wrong call. If she parries it (which is counter-intuitive when you can catch it, but the ball was so close to the line), the game goes to overtime. That goal will probably keep her up a couple of nights but she's an excellent GK. Without looking at the stats, it did seem like UCLA was the stronger side to be honest, and Penn State was just a scrappy puncher that had a lot of fight in them and would not go quietly into the loss column. Great game.
What I've seen lately.... Saw a bit of Stanford's 5-1 (I think) win over San Francisco. The Cardinal, as usual, are loaded, and it's hard to see anyone beating them. Maybe UCLA, maybe USC, but I wouldn't bet on it. Speaking of USC, I saw quite a bit of their game yesterday against Florida State. Good game between two good teams. It was mostly a defensive struggle that ended in a 0-0 tie. Florida State had more possession and more shots--but USC's defense held up very well, especially in the horrible florida humidity, and getting a result at FSU, where the Seminoles almost never lose, is an achievement. The USC keeper made the play of the game when she tipped a fantastic free kick by FSU's Castallanos just over the bar, preventing what looked like a sure goal. The Trojans grew into the game and nearly scored on a couple of late game counters. Saw a bit of UCLA vs. Florida. UCLA was the better team, even without Fleming and Mace, but couldn't put the ball in the net and this game, too, ended in a 0-0 tie. Any time you can keep UCLA from scoring you've done a good job. Saw Wisconsin boss Kentucky. The Badgers got whipped by FSU a couple of weeks ago but have a very solid squad and asserted themselves against a kentucky team that will probably be lower-level SEC squad.