Beginning with next year’s NCAA women’s basketball tournament, the top 16 teams will be placed in the bracket in their true ranking regardless of conference affiliation.In the past, the top four teams in a conference would be placed in different regions to protect them from playing each other until the Final Four. For example, the tournament this past season had four SEC teams in the top eight overall seeds. Texas was third, South Carolina fourth, LSU fifth and Vanderbilt seventh. LSU was dropped down to seventh and Vanderbilt eighth in the bracketing to avoid having them be in the same regions.Now if that happened going forward, the teams would remain where their seeds should have them.“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 said in a phone interview. “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 men’s selection committee will still separate out the t …
