(12-05-2018, 06:20 AM)2006alum Wrote: However, I will say my general sense is that we tend to win more championships when we're NOT the number one seed than when we are (think of all of our women's tennis team's championships as a double-digit seed).
I certainly won't refute your general point about the top seed being a psychological burden (that rings true), but specifically as to women's tennis, I'll just point out that the ranking systems (and thus, NCAA seeds) uniquely impact Stanford women's tennis because Coach Lele Forood has her sights trained on winning a national championship every year, so she seems to schedule
just enough good teams to get a Top 16* seed while not overtaxing the players' bodies so they're a bit fresher than other teams for NCAAs. In many of those years, Stanford was still seen as one of the favorites, and was all season long. (For example, Stanford was the preseason #1 team last season. Due to injuries and taking a few losses to good teams, Stanford was ranked and seeded 15th for NCAAs, because our schedule was undeniably lighter than other top teams. But most in the tennis world still figured Stanford was one of the handful of teams that could win it all.)
In other sports, by contrast, NCAA seeding might be more holistically done by a committee trying to assess how good each team is, or polls of media members or coaches will be a big factor in seeding. Tennis just doesn't really have that, and has its BCS-like formula that some teams schedule around, while Lele seems to just want to make sure she gets a Top 16* seed and the home NCAA tournament matches that come with it. So, I'm not sure how useful it is an example of the general point.
* Note: Since women's tennis is moving to a baseball-like "super regional" format, you now need to have a Top 8 seed to be in line for home matches until you get to the final site (up through last year, a top 16 seed did the trick, as 16 teams made the final site--now, just 8 do). We know Stanford will participate in ITA Kick-Off Weekend and the Indoor Nationals that follow, so that's evidence Lele has altered her approach somewhat. But because the final schedule isn't out yet, we don't know how much the approach is changing. Are we adding those matches to our standard marquee non-conference opponents like Pepperdine, Vanderbilt, Florida, and lately a good Big 12 team (
e.g., Oklahoma State or Texas)? Or are we
replacing some or all of those matches with Indoor Nationals? If it's the former, a good season would certainly have us in the Top 8. If it's the latter, then we can't afford more than a loss or two (in addition to cruising through the Pac-12) if we want a Top 8 seed. Some teams already have their schedules published, and we're on Vanderbilt's and Texas's schedules, but for the first time in several years, we're
not playing Pepperdine or Florida, which is disappointing. You could make up for that by scheduling a non-conference match with a good Pac-12 team like Cal, USC, or UCLA, but for whatever reason, we've chosen not to do that anymore. (FWIW, Cal, UCLA, and USC all play each other twice this coming season, with just one match against each opponent counting in conference standings. But if the teams are good, they're all valuable for ranking and seeding purposes.) Of course, we might have scheduled a couple of other interesting non-conference matchups against Top 25-level teams, but if Vanderbilt and Texas are it for marquee non-conference matches outside of Indoor Nationals, our margin of error is as thin as usual. And with that, I'll end this particular tangent!
