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NCAA Women's Tournament Bracketology
by Marc Lucero, 16 April 2008
As we pass by Tax Day, the college tennis regular season is drawing to a close. Conference races are wrapping up, and post-season tournaments are coming up quickly.
Maybe it was the excitement of seeing my alma mater
Boston College win the NCAA Hockey Championship over the weekend, but the
NCAA Tennis Championships have been on my mind.
One interesting thing about this year's hockey tournament was that the runner-up team was Notre Dame. Besides the fact that this is a program that has really gone from a mediocre team at best to a national contender, the fact that stands out is that the Irish were the last team to get an at-large bid into the tournament. The hockey tournament only starts with 16 teams, not 64 like tennis or basketball but it is still an incredible accomplishment for a team that was on the bubble to make a run to the championship game.
All of this thinking led me to do some amateur bracketology work of my own. There are 31 conferences that receive automatic bids for the conference champion. The rest of the field is composed of the 33 teams that receive at-large bids as decided on by the NCAA selection committee.
I picked my conference champions and then picked my at-large teams according to the NCAA selection criteria. For those who are unaware how the committee selects at-large teams, the criteria are as follows:
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