Report: NCAA women’s tourney to move to straight seeding of top 16

Field Level Media|published: 07/13/2026, 9:36pm EDT

Mar 27, 2026; Sacramento, CA, USA; Louisiana State Tigers head coach Kim Mulkey against the Duke Blue Devils at the Sweet Sixteen game of the Sacramento Regional 2 of the women's 2026 NCAA Tournament at Golden 1 Center. Mandatory Credit: Ed Szczepanski-Imagn Images

The NCAA women's tournament is introducing a change in how the top 16 seeds will be positioned in the bracket.

The chair of the NCAA women's basketball committee said they will no longer make tweaks to the order of those top 16 teams that they used to make to avoid putting conference rivals in the same regions.

"We put a lot of time into establishing those top 16 teams in the order they go in," committee chair Amanda Braun told the Associated Press on Monday. "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."

This past March, LSU was the committee's fifth overall team and was dropped to seventh to avoid putting the Tigers in the same region as No. 4 overall seed South Carolina. Vanderbilt got bumped from seventh to eighth for the same reason.

The men's selection committee is not adopting the same policy, however. They'll still work to place the top seeds from the same conference into different regions.

Both the men's and women's tournaments are expanding to 76 teams in 2027.

--Field Level Media