How stats (and some history) would pick the 2025 women's NCAA Tournament

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Hey, you can never say I’m above going back to the exact same well over and over. I did this for NCAAW for the first time last year and it went fairly well; we ended up getting the champion and three of the Final Four teams in the first go-around, only missing on Stanford. Might as well try it again, huh?

All numbers used are from Bart Torvik, who expanded his site’s numerical coverage to women’s basketball this year. It was a tremendous, tremendous resource all season long. Before I forget, sign up here. The first couple of matchups are free; the rest are not.

Let’s go.

Region 1 (Spokane)

(1) UCLA (-34.5) over (16) First Four. Strangely, both UC San Diego and Southern profile well for 16 seeds, but the gap from them to UCLA is…rather large.

(9) Georgia Tech (-2.5) over (8) Richmond. Tech projects to have around a 6-possession shot attempt advantage in this game, and against top-150 opposition, these two teams’ stats works out to about a +5 turnover margin advantage for GT. Richmond’s obviously got the far superior shooting offense, and I think this is basically a dead heat, but in such events I want to lean with the team who has the ability to make up for a bad shooting day.