MU Women Advance to WNIT Quarterfinals

[Ahoya06]

Not that it removes the bowling ball from the gut, but the ladies just knocked off Illinois to advance to the WNIT quarterfinals. Ironically, they'll be playing Kentucky, I'm not sure of the date or location. Glad to see the women's team doing well in their postseason!

[TallTitan34]

Sunday I believe.

[TallTitan34]

Here is a photo from before tonight's game.

[Marquette Fan]

They play Sunday at Kentucky at 1p central.  The NCAA's are preferred of course but I think the WNIT is better than nothing.  This team graduates just one player and had 6 frosh this year.  At least they got 2 home games and it's great postseason experience for a young team.  They have two juco's (one juco All-American) and two high school players coming in next season.  Junior Krystal Ellis from Racine is already around 6th or 7th on the all-time scoring list with around 1,460 career points.

[rugbydrummer]

yeah, the WNIT is alright except for the sites are all completely unfair since they are true home & away games . . of course it's nice to enjoy the home advantage initially, but it never lasts, which just makes me wish it were all at neutral sites

but I guess that's called the NCAA tournament, though, right?   oh well, hopefully Svetlana can lead us to another successful matchup against UK!!  hopefully Time Warner has this on!!  Or do I have to worry about TV coverage all over again?!

[chapman]

Besides the obvious advantage to home teams, I think the WNIT might be more interesting anyway.  The disparity in women's college basketball is so bad that the NCAA tournament is usually about as uninteresting as it gets.  I could fill out a bracket picking all the favored seeds, then use the AP poll rankings to determine the Final Four games and I would do better than I ever have in any of my men's tournament brackets.  While the top teams aren't in the WNIT, without the huge disparity that the powerhouse schools bring to the NCAA tournament the tournament itself becomes more interesting.

[Marquette Fan]

yeah, the WNIT is alright except for the sites are all completely unfair since they are true home & away games . . of course it's nice to enjoy the home advantage initially, but it never lasts, which just makes me wish it were all at neutral sites

but I guess that's called the NCAA tournament, though, right?   oh well, hopefully Svetlana can lead us to another successful matchup against UK!!  hopefully Time Warner has this on!!  Or do I have to worry about TV coverage all over again?!

I doubt there will be any TV coverage and unfortunately it looks like Kentucky didn't have any online video for their game tonight.  I know South Dakota State and Wisconsin had their first WNIT games broadcast online.  All UK had available tonight was Gametracker and I hate having to follow games that way as Gametracker seldom works for a whole game.  I'll have to see if I can find a UK radio broadcast.  Even if Time Warner wanted to show Sunday's game, I'm not sure they could.  A UW fan contacted the Big Ten Network asking if they were going to televise their first round game and they responded saying they didn't have rights to air games from the WNIT and I'm guessing Time Warner might have the same rights issue.  I think the WNIT final is the only one setup to be broadcast.  And just a reminder that the WNIT stays on campus sites through the final and they don't goto New York at the end.

And by the way, the Women's NCAA Tournament isn't on neutral courts a lot of the time.  It used to be seeds 1-4 hosted on their homecourt.  A few years ago they went to predetermined sites but if you're hosting and in the NCAA's you play on your homecourt no matter your seed.  So this year 1 seed Tennessee had to play 9 seed Purdue on Purdue's court, 2 seed Rutgers had to play 7 seed Iowa State in Des Moines (about 30 minutes from their campus and they have a ton of fans), 4 seed Viriginia had to play 5 seed Old Dominion on their homecourt and 5 seed West Virginia had to play 12 seed New Mexico on their homecourt.  I think the rest of the teams playing at home were the better seeds than their opponent.  UCONN wasn't technically on their homecourt but close enough playing in Bridgeport, Connecticut.  LSU is a 2 seed and now gets to play in the regional in New Orleans.