(Editor's note: Though we here at FCP World Headquarters have implicit confidence in the wit and wisdom of Eric Woehler, we still plan to update these brackets every couple of weeks during the season, just to be on the safe side.)
I'm wrong.
That said, here are the 64 teams who will make the 1998 NCAA women's basketball tournament, where they'll be seeded and, finally, who among them will survive.
Oh, and the final score of the championship game.
| Seed | Team | Comment |
|---|---|---|
| 1. | Tennessee | If Pat Summitt is John Wooden, does that mean Chamique Holdsclaw is Bill Walton? |
| 2. | Old Dominion | A once-great team, at last great again, slips a half notch to very, very good. There's no replacing Clarisse Machanguana. |
| 3. | North Carolina | Even without Marion Jones, UNC will win 25. The Heels are that good, and the rest of the ACC is that overrated. |
| 4. | Texas | A good team in a great conference, you don't want the Horns in March. |
| 5. | Iowa State | Victories follow Bill Fennelly, the third-year coach, who averaged 23.7 wins a season and advanced to three NCAA tournaments in seven winters at Toledo. |
| 6. | George Washington | The game's most delightful talent of a year ago, Colonials center Tajama Abraham, is gone to the WNBA. There was thought Coach Joe McKeown might be gone by now, too. But he's still around -- as will be GW in March. |
| 7. | Duke | The stuff of first-round upsets. |
| 8. | Maine | If I'm Californian Gary Cavalli, I'm spending winter in balmy Orono. Add sensational Cindy Blodgett to the mix next year, and the American Basketball League's mostly-homegrown New England Blizzard is the most compelling story going in pro women's hoops of any alphabet. |
| 9. | Rutgers | Sophomore guard Usha Gilmore has two collies, one she named 'Tim Hardaway.' |
| 10. | Auburn | No one's back, except Joe Ciampi. He's probably enough. |
| 11. | Colorado | Ditto Ceal Barry. |
| 12. | Clemson | Ditto Jim Davis. |
| 13. | Harvard | Before coming to Harvard in 1982, Coach Kathy Delaney-Smith directed Westwood (Mass.) High's girls' basketball team to six undefeated regular seasons. |
| 14. | East Carolina | ODU's back at the top of the polls, and Adrienne Goodson and Nancy Lieberman-Cline are finally U.S. pro stars. It's about time Anne Donovan resurfaced, too. Hey, it's a good time to be a Monarch. |
| 15. | Liberty | Fifteen more wins than in 1995-96 and everybody's back. |
| 16. | Jackson State | Big juniors Tamara Mason (6-3) and twins Tracey and Stacey Sullivan (6-2) boost expectations. |
| Seed | Team | Comment |
|---|---|---|
| 1. | Illinois | Experienced, good and big -- what's not to love? |
| 2. | Connecticut | There comes a point in a program's history when the team never really goes away. |
| 3. | Arizona | By New Year's Eve, Coach Joan Bonvicini will know: at Louisiana Tech, Dec. 30. |
| 4. | Vanderbilt | Gonna be some sweet sounds coming down in Nashville. |
| 5. | Western Kentucky | Now that she's surrounded by seniors, how super will sophomore Jaime Walz turn out to be? |
| 6. | Nebraska | Arkansas coach Gary Blair once said Paul Sanderford finds six to 10 points a game where other coaches don't begin to look. Angela Beck was a big loss, but Sanderford was a big find. |
| 7. | Drake | Suddenly, Des Moines's a magnet for every corn-fed 6-4 schoolgirl with a turnaround. |
| 8. | Kent | A 92-58 winner over Toledo with forward Carrie Templin in the lineup last season; 102-80 and 88-64 losers to the Mid-American Conference champs after she broke her wrist. Templin's back. |
| 9. | Colorado State | Now an assistant coach with the Utah Starzz, former CSU head coach Greg Williams left the cupboard far from bare. |
| 10. | Indiana | 'Q' rules the skies -- when she can stay on the floor. The Hoosiers 6-5 center Quacy Barnes is an effective scorer and rebounder and among the country's best shot-blockers, but foul trouble is a problem. |
| 11. | Marquette | A rookie coach, Terri Mitchell, and two rookies starters, forwards Ayesha Rembert and Abbie Willenborg, spearheaded the turnaround from 8-20 to 21-10. |
| 12. | Southwest Missouri State | Part of a recruiting ebb tide in between flows of future All-Americans to Louisiana Tech, transfer point guard Yen Quach could flourish with SMSU. |
| 13. | Eastern Kentucky | Forward Laphelia Doss bullies the Ohio Valley Conference again. |
| 14. | Furman | After laboring through a non-conference schedule tougher than that of many perennial powers, look for the Paladins to obliterate their Southern Conference foes -- oh, and no first-round defeat in the league tournament this year. |
| 15. | Wisconsin-Green Bay | Not exactly what they meant when they nicknamed it 'Titletown USA,' but, nonetheless, ... |
| 16. | Missouri-Kansas City | Eleven of 12 Lady Pirates played at least 11 minutes a game last season. It seems like that couldn't possibly work mathematically. |
| Seed | Team | Comment |
|---|---|---|
| 1. | Louisiana Tech | If you've never been to a Lady Techsters game, go. Ruston's the Grand Ole Opry of women's college basketball. Just go. |
| 2. | Alabama | There's not much left in the middle, but Dominique Canty is that good. |
| 3. | Tulane | There's not much left on the perimeter, but Barbara Farris is that good. |
| 4. | Stephen F. Austin | And if Ruston is the Grand Ole Opry, Nacogdoches is Branson, Mo. |
| 5. | Wisconsin | Coach Jane Albright-Dieterle: 'One of our strengths is that we fell flat on our face last year and we don't want to do it again.' |
| 6. | Oregon | Three of five starters are gone, but consider this: The Ducks hadn't posted a winning season in the four years before Jody Runge arrived as head coach in 1993 but haven't missed the NCAA tournament in the four seasons since. |
| 7. | Florida International | Perhaps not truly among the country's best 28 teams by season's end, but what's the committee going to do with a team with 26 or 28 wins going into the tournament? |
| 8. | Purdue | So, suddenly, the traditionally powerful Boilermakers fall into the lap of a 31-year-old, Carolyn Peck, with four years of assistant-coaching experience. This could work. A former Vanderbilt standout with pro-playing experience and apprenticeships under two U.S. Olympic coaches (Summitt and Nell Fortner) -- well, you wouldn't think she'd get turned away at too many recruits' doors. |
| 9. | Kansas | One of these years, the rest of the Big 12 is going to crowd Kansas right out of the tournament. This might be the year. |
| 10. | Georgia | All five starters from last season are gone, as are a couple of key reserves and Kiesha Brown, the 1996 high-school player of the year. So how could Andy Landers possibly have NCAA tournament hopes? Because great recruits believe they are good enough to play right now, and because sometimes they go to a school where they have the immediate opportunity to prove they are correct. |
| 11. | Rice | Just a hunch. Rice has been on a steady climb, and Coach Cristy McKinney is one of the best at uncovering a better opponent's vulnerabilities. |
| 12. | Cincinnati | Nine of the Bearcats' first 10 games are at home. Sharp-shooting 5-4 Jolinda Lewis might get so hot, she doesn't cool off until spring. |
| 13. | Northwestern | Speaking of shooters, Wildcat sophomore Kristina Divjak is a good one, too: better than 45 percent from beyond the arc last season. |
| 14. | Duquesne | Let's hope, anyway. We should all get a chance to catch the game of everybody's Croatian All-American, Korie Hlede. |
| 15. | Howard | Sanja Tyler, a sub-.500 coach after 16 seasons with the Bison, is on a roll entering her 18th at the helm in the nation's capital. With 240 wins entering the season and another 22 to 25 within her grasp this winter, Tyler appears destined to join the 300-victory club. |
| 16. | St. Francis (Pa.) | They rebound, they defend and everybody's back. |
| Seed | Team | Comment |
|---|---|---|
| 1. | Stanford | OK, obviously, Stanford's a terrific team -- a big pile of high-school all-stars. And yet, if you're Tara VanDerveer and you look down the bench in a tight game, isn't there some little part of you that whimsically remembers when your backup point guard was Dawn Staley? |
| 2. | Florida | Assuming Carol Ross found a shooter or two over the summer. |
| 3. | Texas Tech | Great pickup: 5-9 Kim Martinez, a Texas Tech softball player, is a walk-on with the Lady Raiders. Two seasons ago, she was the leading basketball scorer among the California junior colleges. |
| 4. | Iowa | Nobody wake the Hawkeyes. |
| 5. | Washington | A million women's basketball newsgroup subscribers can't be wrong! |
| 6. | Montana | 'Redpath and Sisco' -- well, yippy-aye-ay! Center Krista and guard Skyla put the growl in the Grizz. |
| 7. | Virginia | Monick Foote's out, and the Cavs need a hand. |
| 8. | Arkansas | With Georgia, Auburn and Louisiana State on the slide, a few more victories should shake down from the higher branches on the Southeastern Conference tree. |
| 9. | UCLA | This crop of Bruins might have a Final Four or two in them. |
| 10. | San Diego State | Another big loss/big find coaching equation: Beth Burns out to Ohio State, Barb Smith in from Colorado. |
| 11. | Utah | A good backcourt goes a long way, and the Utes have one in Alli Bills and Julie Krommenhoek. |
| 12. | Santa Clara | Six-six Christine Rigby, a lone giant at Santa Clara, counteracts San Francisco's stable of 6-3 youngsters and puts the Broncos atop the West Coast Conference. |
| 13. | North Carolina State | Nothing's cooler than the headband Wolfpack senior Chasity Melvin wears 'Slick' Watts-style during games. |
| 14. | Lehigh | The Engineers were 3-24 in 1994-95. In her first season as coach, Sue Troyan led Lehigh to a 14-13 mark; in her second, a 15-15 record and the program's first NCAA-tournament berth. Even before she turned around the women's basketball team, Troyan was a Lehigh legend, having converted the softball team from a seven-game winner the year before she arrived to a three-time Patriot League titlist. |
| 15. | UC-Irvine | Big-scoring, big-rebounding senior forward Leticia Oseguera is preparing for a big finale. |
| 16. | Siena | Because someone from the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference has to go. |
10/27/97
