NCAA women's basketball tournament gets new selection metric: What is Wins Above Bubble?

24/07/2025 21:38

WAB will reward teams for playing against — and beating — good teams. It could help teams like Virginia Tech, who were left on the bubble last season.

When the NCAA Division I Selection Committee for the women's basketball tournament meets this upcoming season, there will be a new metric that committee members consider when figuring out where to place squads in the 68-team bracket.

It's called Wins Above Bubble — or simply WAB — and it's been a popular metric used in the men's game for a few years and was officially used by the men's selection committee last season.

In a Her Hoop Stats newsletter from 2021, writer Calvin Wetzel laid out what the metric's purposes are: "It answers the question, 'How many more wins does Team A have than the number of wins a bubble team would be expected to have against the same schedule?'"

On its website, the NCAA explained the metric this way: "Wins Against Bubble calculates the expected winning percentage for an average bubble team in each game of a team's schedule and then subtracts that total from the team's actual number of wins. For example, if an average bubble team was expected to win 19 games against Team A's schedule, but Team A won 20, it would have a +1.0 WAB rating. It's the amount of wins you have minus the amount of wins an average bubble team would expect to have versus your schedule."

In short, the metric will reward teams for playing against — and beating — good teams.

And it's a metric that Jackie Carson, the ACC's Senior Associate Commissioner for Women's Basketball, supports.

Carson said she sat down with some members of the selection committee earlier this year after Virginia Tech was one the First Four Out of the 2025 NCAA Tournament.

"What do we need to tell our schools? How do we need to schedule better? You know? So, I did a deep dive into that," Carson told SB Nation this week.

The Hokies, under first-year head coach Megan Duffy, went 19-13 and 9-9 in ACC play this past season. They ranked 47th in NET, but had seven wins against teams that ranked in the top 100 in NET, which was more than Washington and Columbia and the same number as Princeton and Nebraska, all of whom received at-large bids to the tournament.

"I love (WAB), because I think that was a little bit of our argument," Carson said. "We have to beat schools that we're supposed to beat and we have to win games that we're supposed to win, right? But I also think there's something to be said about, if we lose to someone in the ACC, you're still playing a stronger strength of schedule compared to someone else in a different league that is beating team (ranked) 275 (in NET). So, I love that there's a new metric that rewards, you know, who are you playing? And what have they done?"

Virginia Tech had three wins against teams who made the NCAA Tournament during ACC play: Georgia Tech, Louisville and Cal.

"We had some fantastic wins, and then we had a couple that slipped away from us, and those are all learning experiences," Duffy said earlier this month during a Zoom with reporters. "Expectations are high… With the group we have, we're going to set our bar high. I don't really honestly know or care what that means relative to the tournament or where we are in the league. We want to be at the top."

With Virginia Tech left on the bubble, eight teams from the ACC made the NCAA Tournament last season. The Hokies bolstered their roster in the offseason, adding three transfers from fellow Power 4 programs in Sophie Swanson (Purdue), Melannie Daley (Northwestern) and Kilah Freelon (Texas Tech). Duffy also brings back her top two scorers from last season in Carleigh Wenzel and Carys Baker.

New talent combined with this new metric could help the Hokies get back in the big dance next season.