No clue why Dawn Staley has to be offended at everything. On one hand, sure, she has an argument. The committee claims to value teams that put together tough OOC schedules. Staley does that. She routinely has the toughest OOC schedule in women's basketball. And for being the toughest schedule in the land, her team did remarkably well against it. Now for the other hand: her team got handled at UCLA and inexplicably got smoked at home to UConn. Enough with the whining. If you had to have the overall #1 seed, you should have played better in either one of those games.

And if she'd stop her whining and look at where the dust settled: her team has the easiest path to the championship game of any of the other 1 seeds. The only threats in her region are #2 Duke (a team she already easily handled), and #3 UNC. Either way, Dawn has owned teams from the ACC for quite some time now. Without even blinking, she's already in the FF. Once in the FF, her most likely opponent will either be Texas (a team she's already manhandled twice) or TCU (a team she blew out by 33 pts). Maybe ND makes a surprise run. Either way, that's the softest path to the title game.


On the flip side, overall #1 UCLA will have to dispatch of either the surging 2 seed NCST (ACC regular season champ), or the always dangerous 3 seed LSU. Should they survive that, they are staring at either SoCal (who beat them twice and had them the third time until the ball suddenly stopped going in the hoop), or UConn (arguably 1 seed quality but lacked the resume, and a team that is playing really well right now and always saves their best ball for the tournament).


So just chill, Dawn. Not that a title this year is a given, but the path to one is about as soft as it could have ever been intentionally crafted. She should sail somewhat smoothly straight to the title game at which point her 11-deep roster gives her the advantage given the game is played on relatively short rest.