She and Liliana Light make a pretty good recruiting class already with two more scholarships to give.

Nice to have the title back on the west coast, but Dunning may not have been exaggerating when he said they will get 8 losses next year. Stanford did not look that great in their losses (and nearly losing to Wisconsin). Still, they do learn fast.

As always, regarding ranking, invitations, and seeding the NCAA decisions will continue to be perplexing. Outside of death and taxes, it is the one constant we can depend upon.

One way to measure it is to look at RPI upsets. A team that loses to a better RPI team is by that indicator at least, performing as expected. The RPI Upset, then, is a measure of underperformance (the upset team) and overperformance (the winning team). I’ll cancel those out one for one winning with losing RPI Upsets within a conference. Just looking at RPI Upsets, here are the underperforming and overperforming conferences in the tournament:

The Good:
Big East: 40% overperformance. [2-Teams, 5-Matches, 2-RPI Upset (W)]
Mountain West: 40% overperformance. [3, 5, 2(W)]
AAC: 33.3% overperformance. [2, 3, 1(W)]
Pac 12: 17.4% overperformance. [8, 23, 1(L), 5(W)]

The Bad:
Big 10: 11.1% underperfomance. [8, 27, 5(L), 2(W]
ACC: 12.5% underperformance. [3, 8, 1(L)]
Big 12: 14.3% underperformance. [6, 14, 4(L), 2(W)]
SEC: 25% underperformance. [4, 8, 2(L)]
WCC: 25% underperformance. [2, 4, 1(L)]

The Ugly:
Atlantic 10: 100% underperformance. [1, 1, 1(L)]
Conference USA: 100% underperformance. [1, 1, 1(L)]

The Rest: performed as expected by RPI.

I’ll take a look at under/over performance relative to seeding later; need a strong coffee break…

The RPI Upsets:
– There were 16 RPI upsets out of a total of 63 tournament matches, a 25.4% upset ratio.
– Six of the RPI upsets were in the ranks of the 48 unseeded teams, or 12.5%
– Ten of the RPI upsets were in the ranks of the 16 seeded teams, so the upset ratio among the seeded was 62.5%
– Five of the ten RPI upsets among the seeded teams were to unseeded teams. Creighton-RPI 17, recorded two of these. The other unseeded to record upsets of the seeded were Arizona-RPI 36; Ohio St.-RPI 34; and Florida St.-RPI-22.
– Five of the ten RPI upsets among the seeded teams were to other seeded teams. Stanford-RPI 11 and sixth seed, recorded three of these. The other seeded teams to record upsets were UCLA-RPI 12 and 10th seed, and Texas-RPI 4 and 4th seed.
– RPI Upsets by round: 1st round, 6 of 32 matches (19%); 2nd round, 4 of 16 (25%); 3rd round, 2 of 8 (25%); 4th round, 1 of 4 (25%); 5th round, 2 of 2 (100%); 6th round, 1 of 1 (100%).

The Best of the Worst (or the Worst of the Best):
– The highest RPI team to record a win was Washington St., Pac-12, RPI 43.
– Washington St. was also by coincidence, the 43rd best RPI team in the tournament.

The Losers:
– Of the 21 teams with a worse RPI than Washington St., 17 were conference champions and auto qualifiers, and were the bottom 17 RPI teams in the tournament. These bottom 17 came from the following conferences: Colonial, Mid-American, ASUN, Southland, Ivy League, Patriot, OVC, Big Sky, Big South, Summit League, Metro Atlantic, Western Athletic, Southern, America East, Mid-Eastern, Southwestern, and Northeast. All were the lone representative of their conference in the tournament. None recorded a win.
– In addition to the 17 bottom conference AQ teams that filled out the bottom of the tournament RPI list, there were three other one bid AQ conferences that recorded no conference wins, these were: Horizon (Cleveland St., RPI-37); Atlantic 10 (Dayton, RPI-28); Conference USA (Western Ky., RPI-14).
– Missouri Valley Conference had three representatives, RPI 21, 44, and 45. None recorded a win.
– Mid-American Conference had two representatives, RPI 40 and 51. None recorded a win.
– In summary, 22 of the 32 tournament AQ teams (conference champions) recorded no wins. These 22 conferences provided a total of 25 teams that recorded no wins.