Three tier 's of women's Div 1 basketball ?

[jackdaniel]

I've read on other boards the "three tiers of Div 1 women's basketball" theory.First level,basically the top 8-10 ranked teams, these are teams that recruit the best High School players regularly each & every year in the entire nation.Second level is the middle of the pack major conference teams + upper level mid-major program's.Third tier ....everyone else.It seems to make sense when you see scores like Notre Dame 90, Charlotte 31.Is Notre Dame that much better than Charlotte, or is that program just falling apart since we beat them this year. Maybe both falling apart & ND is much better?

Well...just looked at the box score Charlotte shot 24.5% from field, 10% 3 pt. fg, & 33% from the line....43 TO's,WOW ....also got out rebounded

[Stephen Shirley]

Re: Three tier 's of women's Div 1 basketball ?

I would agree that there are three tiers. You can pretty much guarantee which 8-10 teams each year are going to make the Elite Eight (UConn, UT-K, Stanford, LSU, UNC, Duke, top two teams from Big 12, one more from Big East and one from Big 10).

Then it's basically 10-40 that fluctuate mildly with some teams bubbling up to briefly challenge the top 10 and others dropping briefly before rebounding. Within this group, you tend to see 5-10 ###-majors rotating in and out. MT and SDSU along with Xavier, Bowling Green, George Washington, Gonzaga, Utah, JMU, ODU and others are regulars here.

The third tier is largely irrelevant aside from the occasional upset. These teams struggle to build credibility and often don't even try.

The gap between the bottom of Tier 1 and the top of Tier 2 is often very small. (Tier 1 has a wide gap among itself though--see UConn v. Stanford). You regularly see Tier 2 teams beat Tier 1 teams. The gap between Tier 2 and Tier 3 is more significant and you see fewer of those upsets.

The challenge for ###-major powers is to challenge more for Tier 1. It hurts our cause when we have to schedule (and beat up) each other when so many of the Power 6 Tier 2 teams are afraid to schedule us (see Candy's attitude towards MT). We have to get ###-majors to the Elite Eight and Final Four.