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Numbers to mull from Women's Regionals
8
Teams seeded in the top eight in the three NCAA Division I Women's Regionals who failed to advance to the national championship.
__East
__Wake Forest, 3; Florida, 7.
__Central
__Michigan State 4; Georgia, 5; Denver, 6.
__
West
__Ohio State, 4; LSU, 7; California, 8.
I repeat the teams not to embarrass them, but to make a point. The depth of women's college golf continues to develop, so much so that the NCAA Division I committee was only able to predict with 66.7 percent accuracy the schools that would advance to the NCAA Championship next week at CC of Landfall in Wilmington, N.C. (It's also the same percentage I got right, which I'm not sure makes me pretty smart to be in line with the committee or a little off my game for not having a better batting average. But I digress ...)
Now this is a separate argument from suggesting that there's more parity in women's college golf. I'm not quite a believe in that statement, not when the number of schools to win the NCAA title in the last 10 years is only six and we still haven't had a northern school win the title. The game can have more competitive teams (hence being "deeper") but not more great teams (hence having "parity").
However, the best number to suggest that parity is potentially near is this one:
10
The seed that South Carolina, the East Regional champ, held in entering play at Ironwood CC in Greenville, S.C. In other words, the Gamecocks were believed to be worse than nine other schools in the 24-team field out East, but eventually won the title.
Here is a look at the 24 that will be heading to nationals.