2022 Women’s NCAA Tournament Bracket Advancement Odds
Our projection of the chances of each team to win in each round
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March Madness has arrived: the First Four tips off tonight at 7 PM on ESPNU. Since Selection Sunday, everyone has been feverishly researching stats in order to fill in their brackets for tournament pools. We know because we’ve seen the traffic on herhoopstats.com. Speaking of pools, don’t forget to enter our group on ESPN as we’re giving away merch and free subscriptions to our stats site to the top finishers.
As regular readers know, we’ve been projecting games all season for our subscribers. They’ve done well too, as our Calvin Wetzel and his #WetzBets are up significantly for the year on his wagers leveraging our model. For this article, we’ve used our game model to estimate the odds of each team winning in each round, up to and including the championship.
A few notes:
We’re using the same model we’ve used all season, these results are not based on a custom model for the tournament.
The results presented below are based on 15,000 random simulations of each game of the tournament and do account for home-court advantage in the first two rounds. That may sound like a lot of simulations but the results can vary slightly, don’t read too much into a 0.1% difference between teams.
There has been significant discussion of UConn playing in Bridgeport, CT if they reach the second week of the tournament. While they’re playing in their home state, for this analysis we’ve treated UConn’s games in Bridgeport as neutral site games since they are not in Storrs or Hartford. The results below count on NC State fans to show up and make it feel at least semi-neutral! Look for our analysis later this week of the impact of considering the Sweet 16 and Elite 8 as potential home games for the Huskies.
We have simulated the First Four games. They’re listed as “OR” in the images below to make it clear they are the opening round and not the Final Four which are labeled “F4”. 60 teams are not playing in the First Four so the table shows those teams as having a 0% chance to win in the opening round.
Our model gives South Carolina the best chance to hoist the trophy in Minneapolis, but it still only occurred in 34% of the simulations. That’s in line with the +185 futures odds currently available on FanDuel at the time of writing which implies a probability of 35.1%. With a roughly two-in-three chance that someone else in the field will win the tournament, that’s why they call it March Madness. Check out the odds for every team below.
Thanks for reading the Her Hoop Stats Newsletter. If you like our work, be sure to check out our stats site, our podcast, and our social media accounts on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. You can also buy Her Hoop Stats gear, such as laptop stickers, mugs, and shirts!
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