Forgive me for writing this out of season, but this is a question I have been asking myself for some time. Since there is evidence of increasing parity in the men's college basketball tournament, I wondered if the same was true for the women's college game, which is considerably younger than its male counterpart. For the record, my definition of parity is less concerned with lower seeds upsetting higher seeds and moving deep into the tournament than simply seeing if the margin of victory between the seeds has decreased.

To begin with, I looked exclusively at the NCAA women's tournament scores from 1994-2006. The reason I started with 1994 is because that was the first year the tournament field consisted of 64 teams, and there should have been a wider disparity in talent between the top seeds and the bottom ones. Also, this thirteen-year span represented the longest period the women's tournament has kept the same format.

In order to determine if there was increasing parity, I took the margin of victory for the higher seeds for all the first round games from 1994-2006 and averaged them together, starting with the 1 vs. 16 match-up, moving onto the 2 vs. 15 match-up, and so on until the 8 vs. 9 games. Whenever there was an upset — a lower seed defeating a higher seed — I counted that as a negative margin of victory. After I averaged all the margins of victory, I then split the data into two parts (1994-2000 & 2001-2006). Here are the results.

As the data show, while some lower seeds have managed greater success against the higher seeds, there is no consistent trend to support the hypothesis that there is a lower disparity level between the top teams in the women's tournament and the bottom teams, at least in the first round. Actually, overall, the average difference of margin of victory between the two time frames is 0.0, meaning nothing has changed over the past thirteen years of the 64-team women's tournament field.