\n<\/p>\n
The women\u2019s NCAA Division I basketball tournament kicks off today, marking the tail end of yet another record-setting year for the sport. Regular season viewership for women\u2019s college basketball was up 19\u00a0percent compared to the previous season on ESPN, reaching its highest average viewership since the 2008\u201309 season.<\/p>\n
Historically, fans fill out far fewer brackets for women\u2019s March Madness than men\u2019s; last year, about five\u00a0million fans completed brackets for the women\u2019s tournament, compared to around 34\u00a0million for the men\u2019s. But women\u2019s basketball fans appear to have better foresight. The most consecutive matchups predicted correctly in a single men\u2019s tournament bracket was 42 last year. For the women\u2019s tournament, however, nine brackets made it through 52 games, while one lucky\u2014or perhaps gifted?\u2014fan accurately guessed the outcomes of 57 consecutive games.<\/p>\n
We\u2019ll see if anyone gets a perfect bracket this year, but considering there is about a one-in-nine-quintillion chance of doing so, we at Inside Higher Ed<\/em> have our doubts.<\/p>\n If you\u2019re still working on your own predictions, consider using Inside Higher Ed<\/em>\u2019s academic bracket, which uses NCAA data on teams\u2019 academic prowess to determine the winner of the women\u2019s basketball tournament. (Our bracket for the men\u2019s tournament is here.)<\/p>\n To select the winner of a given matchup, we use each team\u2019s most recently available academic progress rate, the NCAA metric that measures athlete retention and academic eligibility. The team with the higher APR moves on.<\/p>\n We use graduation metrics to resolve ties, first looking at teams\u2019 graduation success rates\u2014the six-year graduation rate for athletes on the team. If that number is also the same, we use the most comprehensive federal graduation rate\u2014though Ivy League institutions typically don\u2019t have FGRs, which can make things a bit more complicated. On the rare occasion teams tie across all three categories, we turn to the overall GSR for all of the institution\u2019s sports teams.<\/p>\n (We also used these metrics to compare the institutions in the First Four matchups, even though those matches will happen before this story is published Friday.)<\/p>\n We only had to go to that overall GSR tiebreaker once in this bracket, in the Final Four match between the Princeton Tigers and the Holy Cross Crusaders, and then again in the final. Princeton took on the Samford Bulldogs, who had fought their way to the final all the way from a First Four matchup against Southern University.<\/p>\n Fullscreen<\/p>\n But ultimately, Princeton came out on top, besting Samford\u2019s overall GSR by just one point. Congratulations, Tigers!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The women\u2019s NCAA Division I basketball tournament kicks off today, marking the tail end of yet another record-setting year for the sport. Regular season viewership for women\u2019s college basketball was up 19\u00a0percent compared to the previous season on ESPN, reaching its highest average viewership since the 2008\u201309 season. Historically, fans fill out far fewer brackets<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":47238,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[2916,23912,730,11244,1214],"class_list":{"0":"post-47237","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-academics","9":"tag-championbased","10":"tag-madness","11":"tag-march","12":"tag-womens"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=47237"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47237\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/47238"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=47237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=47237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=47237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}