The NCAA women's basketball tournament will see a significant change next season as conference affiliation will no longer be a factor in how the top 16 teams are placed in the bracket. This is the second major change the tournament will see in 2027 because it will also be the first year it expands to 76 teams.
The previous format had the NCAA Tournament committee actively place the top four teams of a conference in different regions to keep them from playing against each other until the Final Four. However, this led to some teams getting seeded lower than they actually earned for the purpose of the bracket. Power conferences expanding in recent years and the upcoming tournament expansion were bound to cause even more logistical challenges. This new change can alleviate some of that.
"We put a lot of time into establishing those top 16 teams in the order they go in," NCAA women's basketball committee chair Amanda Braun told the Associated Press. "You're splitting hairs to decide who has the edge and some of that is undone by those principles. To all of us, the work we did and the work those teams did justifies keeping them where they are in that group of 16."
The 2027 Selection Sunday is set for March 14 and the Opening Round will tip off three days later. The women's Final Four will take place in Columbus, Ohio from April 1-4.
How the change would have affected the 2026 NCAA Tournament
Power conferences will likely be the most affected by the new change. The SEC, ACC, Big Ten and Big 12 were the only conferences with four or more teams participating in this year's tournament, so we will use one of them as an example. The SEC had 10 teams make the tournament, with four of them being in the top eight overall seeds. Texas was the third overall seed, South Carolina was fourth, LSU fifth and Vanderbilt seventh. Here is the official list.
The top four overall teams are No. 1 seeds and the next four are No. 2 seeds. Because of the S-curve (see below for a quick explanation) used for the bracket, LSU would have ended up in the same region as South Carolina. To avoid this, the committee dropped LSU to seventh and consequently Vanderbilt to eighth. Both teams remained No. 2 seeds, but the adjustment led to Iowa being the No. 2 seed in Sacramento 4 with South Carolina. It also moved Vanderbilt coach Shea Ralph to the same region as her former mentor, UConn coach Geno Auriemma.
The rule was not always easy to implement and exceptions were made. In 2025, the ACC had eight teams earn a ticket to the Big Dance. In-state and conference rivals Duke and Carolina North met during the Sweet 16 as No. 2 and No. 3 seeds, respectively. They had already faced each other twice during the regular season, so that became their third encounter.
S-Curve explained
The NCAA Tournament selection committee uses the "S-Curve" for the bracket, which means the seeding list snakes back and forth across regions. The pattern switches directions every four teams. Here is what it looks like:
Overall 1–4 seeds (the No. 1 seeds):
Overall 5–8 seeds (the No. 2 seeds):
- No. 5 overall seed goes to Region D
- No. 6 overall seed goes to Region C
- No. 7 overall seed goes to Region B
- No. 8 overall seed goes to Region A
Overall 9–12 seeds (the No. 3 seeds):
- No. 9 overall seed goes to Region A
- No. 10 overall seed goes to Region B
- No. 11 overall seed goes to Region C
- No. 12 overall seed goes to Region D
And this pattern keeps going until all the team are seeded.
Will this also affect the men's tournament?
No. The men's tournament will still aim to put the top four seeds in each conference in different regions. The committee members' job won't get any easier with the tournament expansion, but they already faced a significant challenge in 2025 when the SEC had a record 14 out of 16 teams in the Big Dance.
"We didn't move anybody off of a seed line, but we really had to move people around to minimize the conflict early," committee chairman and North Carolina athletic director Bubba Cunningham said during the CBS' bracket reveal show. "We made sure we only had at most four (SEC) teams in one region, so that we could spread them out the best we could."
