It’s been a successful season thus far for the Oregon Ducks women’s basketball team and the first projections for the NCAA tournament reflect it.
ESPN’s Charlie Creme’s bracketology is out and right now, the Ducks are a 4-seed and will open the tourney with 13-seed UNLV in Eugene. 5-seed Oklahoma and 12-seed South Dakota State are also projected to play inside Matthew Knight Arena.
Oregon, as are 31 other teams, will be in the Seattle Regional. This is a major change in the structure of the tournament. There are just two regional sites with Greensboro, SC being the other site that would host a whole Sweet 16. This is how ESPN explains it:
The women’s NCAA tournament will undergo significant change for the second consecutive season. The field expanded to 68 teams last year. This season, the customary four regional sites have been reduced to two: Seattle and Greenville, South Carolina. The top 16 teams will continue to host the first and second rounds, and the First Four games will again be played at the site of the first-round games to which they feed.
The Final Four is in Dallas.
The other Pac-12 teams included are Stanford (1-seed) 2 Utah (2-seed), UCLA (3-seed), Arizona (5-seed), and Colorado (10-seed).
Oregon State and USC are officially on the bubble.
Of course, there are still two months left in the regular season and a lot can change over that time, for better or worse.
At 11-3 overall, the Ducks have plenty of time to increase that seed and they will continue Pac-12 play this weekend by going down to the desert to take on Arizona State and Arizona.
[mm-video type=playlist id=01f27mq9z7hjgk6vc6 player_id=01eqbvp13nn1gy6hd4 image=]