On edit - I transposed ISU and Michigan. Originally these were just 4 groups of seeds that I was reading left to right, top to bottom on the screen. Since my original groups 1 & 3 actually play each other in tourney, here's a visual revision:
Right on, the light did go on and just in time. IMO CW was running out of time, 1 or 2 more bad games and she would have been a spot player. I hope she continues to seize the day and helps bring the NC back home. As we have all seen she has the talent to take over a game on both ends of the floor. She is one of the top slashers in WCBB and deserves a title on her cv.
Az won’t be beating UConn again for awhile. They won because they had a very good defensive plan, a good player who was transcendently confident and in the zone, and they were playing a very young, possibly overconfident and inexperienced team who got slapped in the face and never recovered. Both teams are substantially different now, UConn for the better and Az for the worse. Without McDonald, Az is likely going to struggle next season. She lifted that team to a different level with her leadership, confidence, and defensive intensity. I do think they will be a perennial top 25 team for the foreseeable future but next year they will not be a threat to UConn for sure as they simply won’t have the talent. However, Barnes is in on some very good players from the 2022 class and if she gets a couple more of those, she may have them back in the Final Four hunt soon. She already has a verbal from one of the top PGs in that class and will learn tomorrow if Maya Nnaji is going to follow her brother’s footsteps to Arizona. If she does and Barnes can get one more of her targets, we could be looking at the rise of a new power in the west. That would be pretty exciting for a region that has been totally dominated by Stanford for years and years.
