The Women's Basketball Field Keeps Getting Better. So Does UConn.
In a year where the rest of the field may never have been deeper, the Huskies still might render that fact irrelevant.
The 2026 women’s NCAA tournament is officially close at hand: every power conference has now determined its champion, and the remaining conferences are wrapping up this week as the nation’s best teams wait to find out where they’ll be seeded on Selection Sunday.
In the past, all of that might have been window dressing, as upsets were rare in the women’s tourney, and even a 3-seed going to the Final Four was practically a Cinderella. But women’s hoops keeps getting better and deeper, aided by mechanisms like the transfer portal. Most of the top teams have at least one key player — like UCLA’s Lauren Betts, South Carolina’s Ta’Niya Latson, LSU’s MiLaysia Fulwiley, Texas’ Kyla Oldacre and Michigan’s Ashley Sofilkanich — who began their careers with another school.
As a result, the sheer number of potential contenders in this year’s tournament field may never have been larger. Using Sports-Reference’s Simple Rating System (SRS) scores, here’s a breakdown of the strength of the Top 5 teams in the nation by year since 2009-10, their earliest season of complete ratings data:
Looking specifically at teams ranked Nos. 2-5, this year’s crop at those ranking slots are uniformly the highest-rated teams there have been for that rank since at least 2009-10. Fifth-ranked Texas is rated a stunning 11.9 points of SRS better than their average counterpart at No. 5 in the country, LSU is 10.9 points better than the typical No. 4 and South Carolina — who usually ranks no worse than No. 2 by SRS1 — is instead 10 points per game better than the usual No. 3.
And while Nos. 6-10 aren’t quite as historically anomalous as Nos. 2-5, Michigan, Oklahoma, Vandy, Duke and Louisville are also some degree of SRS points better than the typical norm for their ranking slot. The depth of talent spread across the top programs this year truly is beyond what we’ve seen in previous decades of the sport.2
And yet, the onus is still on all of these challengers to prove they are not mere speed-bumps along UConn’s road to another championship. Because, as much as the rest of the top teams have improved over time, the defending NCAA champion Huskies are still No. 1 in SRS on the eve of March Madness — with a rating (51.6) higher than they’ve had since their undefeated 38-0 team in 2015-16.
With a record of 34 wins and 0 losses, UConn hasn’t lost a game since falling to Tennessee on Feb. 6, 2025, or 398 days ago. They just won the Big East tourney by an average of 44.3 points per game, they haven’t won a game by fewer than 30 points since Feb. 18, and only one team — Michigan on Nov. 21 — has kept it within single-digits of coach Geno Auriemma’s team. (The Wolverines lost by 3 after a furious comeback.) This team is more dominant on paper than last year’s champ, which itself had signaled that UConn was back as the nation’s most feared program after a few “down years” by their standards.3
That being said, hope for the rest of the country isn’t completely unfounded. On a percentage basis, teams No. 2-6 in SRS are closer to No. 1 this year than most seasons since 2009-10, especially when we consider the gap from No. 4 LSU and No. 5 Texas to No. 1 UConn, which are nearly the narrowest gaps between those respective rankings in our sample of data:
UConn will likely find itself in the same bracket as one of the other contenders, which should make the NCAA tourney less of a walk through the park than the Huskies’ dominant top-line numbers would indicate. But there are limits: Kalshi gives Connecticut 90 percent Final Four odds and a 68 percent chance to win the national championship.
Most likely, then, the rest of the field will have to take their relative improvement as a moral victory, something to build upon for future seasons. Parity has finally arrived at the top of women’s basketball, with arguably the sport’s deepest crop of contenders ever. It just happens to have arrived at the same time as the best UConn team in a generation.
Filed under: College basketball
The last time they fell outside of that range was 2020-21, when they ranked fifth.
To the point that I was curious about whether SRS was somehow broken for this season. But the average D-I team this year (-0.6 SRS) is in line with the long-term average (-0.8), and this year’s median team (-2.6) is actually worse than the long-term median (-2.3). So this isn’t simply a case of SRS inflation making every team better.
Which meant merely making the Final Four, but not winning the title, nor going undefeated like a conquering empire on a path of total destruction through all rivals. (Hey, everything is relative!)