Possible reasons USF was put in UConn’s bracket:
1) They were the only 5+ seed given home court advantage and this balances it out
2) Their coach is a man, and they put all the top male coaches of teams that might make some noise in the Tourney into one region
3) The Committee tries to disadvantage every non Power-5 team
4) The Committee likes to stick it to Louisville and Kentucky (both male coached, btw)
5) The Committee actually believes that USF could take out UConn on their fourth try
6) The Committee forgot that UConn and USF had already played three times (Don’t laugh – I wouldn’t rule that out after seeing that Kentucky will play a 15 seed it has already beaten and South Carolina can go to the Regional after playing two teams it has already beaten this season!)
I agree with others that USF is a pretty good team – although a bit inconsistent. If they advance far enough to play UConn it will be a boon to their recruiting – remember, a UConn/USF matchup might very possibly be on NATIONAL TV instead of whip-around. (Just think of how happy St. Francis of Brooklyn is that they’re playing UConn instead of another #1 seed. Instead of a minute or two on the whip-around they’re going to get prime-time national coverage. If they lose by 50+ (and they most likely will unless Geno takes pity, puts the subs in and plays zone) it will still be a big plus for the school and the women’s basketball program.
And admit it, fans. Somewhere down deep aren’t you a little worried about having to beat a team for the fourth time? And wouldn’t you be a bit nervous if UConn didn’t have a pretty big lead at the end of the first half?
Um, no. Clearly you have no understanding how the brackets are put together. This conspiracy stuff is getting so lunatic-fringey that I just cringe about what fans of other teams think (though they have their share of crackpots too), and it can only lead them to say that UConn fans are pretty ignorant. Couple of points.
1. The committee starts off by selecting the 64 teams that will be in the Tourney and placing them into seed lines. Teams cannot be moved more than one spot either up or down from those seed lines. Then starting from the #1 seed line they start placing the teams into the four regions, on to seed line #2, to seed line #3, to seed line #4, and to seed line #5. So they get to seed line number #6 this year and they have Louisville in the #3 spot and they have to decide which of the #6 seeds will be placed with the Cardinals and will host a pod. For whatever reason, they look at the four teams available and choose USF, to the utter joy of Jose Fernandez.
------It shows a total ignorance of the bracketing procedures for anyone to be saying that the committee started of by saying, "Let's take Louisville and USF and shove them into the Albany region with UConn." I know there's a lot of conspiracy kitty types out there this time of year, but is just ignorant.
2. So that man-hating committee with the 9-1 woman-to-man ratio got together to just stick "all the male coaches who could make noise" in one bracket with Geno? It had nothing to do with any S-curve, or G-curve, or conference affiliation, or previous regular season meetings? Just throw out the G-curve and put in the Geno-curve? "Okay, we'll fill out Albany first. Geno, Matt, Jeff, Lindsay (probably a man like that Buckingham guy), Karen (real name is probably Kevin), Jose, Jim, CViv (no comment), Anthony, Bill, Nikki (Like that Byrne guy who sings) . . . . . .
------About 60% of the coaches in the Tourney are guys, and if I were one of them who was not in the Albany bracket, I'd be pretty pissed if some fan-expert said my team can't do anything. Gary Blair who took a Texas A&M to a NC trophy, Jim Judkins whose BYU team surpisingly got two wins last year and led UConn with less than 18 minutes to go, Jim Foster whose Chattanooga team knocked of UTenn this year, exciting mid major coaches Karl Smeska of FGCU and Joe Foley of Arkansas-Little Rock and Greg Collins of Western KY and Jonathan Tsipsis of George Washington and Kevin Borseth of Green Bay, P5 hot names Scott Rueck of Oregon State and Kevin McGuff of Ohio State and Joe McKeown of Northwestern -- just put away your noisemakers, guys. It is hereby decreed that you all go quietly into the night.
3. So the committee just wants to stick it to all the non-P5 teams???? Even an unabashed P5 basher like me would feel silly saying that. The P5 has a minority 4 members on the committee, so unless they all decide to gag the 6 non-P5 members and stick them in a dark pit, they couldn't have been saying, "Okay, one spot left to fill, it's either West Virginia or Tulane, and we want it to be the 'Eers." They couldn't and they didn't.
-------There are many ways to argue that P5 teams have an unfair advantage over non-P5 teams for the NCAA Tourney bids, especially with the oft-cited explanation of picks based on Top 25 wins, which the non-P5 teams have less chance to get, but saying that a board with a minority of P5 members has to be biased in favor of the P5 is dumb. And no there was no filibuster that forced the majority to set up that sure thing between UConn and USF
4. Certainly the committee does like to screw over KY and Louisville, I guess, though both teams have done pretty well fighting through the slag piles heaped on top of them as KY has at least been able to cover its seed the last three years and made two E8 trips, and Louisville has had two NC trips since 2009.
--------But both teams are from Kentucky, and the whole world and all its sister planets just hate the Bluegrass State.
5. The committee has got it all set up for USF to take out the reigning champs on a fourth try, right?
---------So of the 40 teams that have made it to the Elite 8, only one has been worse than a #5 seed and most have been much better seeded than #5, so selecting a #6 team to carry out the committee's dirty deed in the E8 seems a bit dumb. If the committee really wanted to take out UConn (like they clearly arranged for Louisville to eliminate Baylor in 2013), why wouldn't they have just moved USF to a #5 seed and have UConn assassinated in the S16 round? Does not grok.
6. The forgetful committee arranges match-ups between teams from the same conference, and especially looks for teams that have played each other three times.
------Man are they bumblers. No teams from the same conference met in any of the 63 games last year, but the year before it happened twice -- in the FF. UConn and ND got to meet up for a fourth time, then Louisville and UConn got to meet a second time in the NC. Most fans might think that the committee had its hands tied about that FF, but maybe conspiracy kitty types think everything is planned to mash conference teams together.
But right, conspiracy theories are so fun to blow out the back passages this time of year.
