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A blog on UConn women's basketball.

Monday, March 15, 2010

It's tourney time

It was business as usual for the UConn women's basketball team who were the No. 1 overall seed for the upcoming NCAA tournament.

On paper it seems as if UConn was rewarded for its dominant season drawing Ohio State, Florida State and Iowa State as the other top seeds in the Dayton Region.

Tennessee, with Duke, West Virginia and Baylor, would seem to have been given a significantly tougher list of potential foes in the Memphis Region. Stanford, the top seed in Sacramento, wasn't done many favors with a red-hot Texas A&M team as the No. 2 seed, No. 3 Xavier (one of the few teams capable of matching the Cardinal's height) and fourth-seeded Oklahoma State. In Kansas City, top-seeded Nebraska may have to contend with No. 2 Notre Dame, No. 3 Oklahoma and No. 4 Kentucky.

Of course much of the attention was the committee's curious decision to make Tennessee to fourth overall seed setting up a potential matchup in the national semifinals. It should hardly come as a surprise considering that ESPN, which has more impact on the sport than is appropriate, recently had multiple continuous hours of memorable UConn/Tennessee NCAA tournament games on ESPN Classic so obviously the network is clamoring for the first UConn/Tennessee matchup since Tennessee coach Pat Summitt pulled the plug on the most visible regular-season series in women's basketball.

UConn coach Geno Auriemma's reaction was predictably less than enthusiastic about the amount of hype the ice-cold relationship between the two Hall of Fame coaches.

"The other two teams that are in (the Final Four) are going to be disrespected, the players are going to be disrespected," Auriemma said about the potential feeding frenzy which will take place if the UConn/Tennessee matchup materializes in the Final Four. "What can I say."

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