A weak non-conference schedule has Buckeyes on the cusp of traveling for first and second rounds of March Madness
Sunday afternoon, the NCAA Tournament committee released the first of two top-16 rankings of the regular season. The annual release shows teams where they’re at in the minds of those selecting which teams will host the first two rounds of March Madness, and the committee put Ohio State women’s basketball in at No. 14.
That puts the Buckeyes in the tournament as a No. 4 seed, as of today. There are still five regular season games and the Big Ten Tournament to play, but it puts Ohio State in a position where the margin for error is thin to avoid a road trip in the tournament this March.
The non-conference schedule sticks out as a reason why Ohio State is in this position. The Buckeyes scheduled no teams in the preseason rankings in their non-conference slate. Ohio State’s biggest test before Big Ten play was the Stanford Cardinal, a team that earned a No. 24 ranking in the Associated Press weekly poll, but lost it after one week and have a 12-12 record in the Cardinal’s first season in the ACC under first year head coach Kate Paye.
Look at the Big Ten schedule and the Buckeyes are 3-2 against top-25 teams, but two of those three wins came against teams that are no longer ranked.
An important change to how the women’s tournament gets ranked is the adoption of the quad system used by the men’s tournament.
In quad 1, meaning games against teams 1-to-25 in the NET at home, 1-to-35 at neutral sites and 0-to-40, the Buckeyes are 2-2. Of the top-16, the Kansas State Wildcats are the only other program playing in only four quad 1 games
Ohio State lost to the No. 1 UCLA Bruins and then No. 7 USC Trojans last week, not helping the Buckeyes. Right now, there are three remaining quad 1 game for Ohio State in the regular season on Thursday, in Bloomington against the Indiana Hoosiers, the Michigan State Spartans trip to Columbus on Feb. 26 and the regular season finale in College Park, Maryland against the Terrapins. That’s subject to change with the NET rankings updating daily.
That means that Ohio State has little margin for error through the end of the regular season and Big Ten tournament. Slip up, especially against teams in the second, third and fourth quads, and the Scarlet and Gray might have to travel for the first two rounds of the NCAA Tournament.
Here is the full top-16:
Top-16 from the NCAA Tournament committee:
1. UCLA
2. South Carolina
3. Texas
4. Notre Dame
5. USC
6. LSU
7. UConn
8. NC State
9. TCU
10. Duke
11. North Carolina
12. Kansas State
13. Kentucky
14. Ohio State
15. Oklahoma
16. Tennessee
The committee will release one more top-16 ranking before the end of the regular season on Feb. 27 at 6:30 p.m. ET, live on ESPN2.