Why March Madness déjà vu in the women’s Final Four isn’t as boring as it sounds

FORT WORTH, Texas — The thought has likely crossed your mind. We’re doing this again? Really? And that’s entirely understandable. Watching a repeat Final Four sounds like a real boring bummer. Watching all No. 1 seeds reach the final weekend is lame. 

This time, we’ll allow it. 

No. 1 seeds Texas and South Carolina clinched their Final Four berths on Monday, joining No. 1 seeds Connecticut and UCLA in the Final Four field and delivering the same quartet that competed in the Final Four a year ago. 

We’ve seen that aspect before. The 1995 and 1996 Final Four competitors were the same, but they weren’t all No. 1 seeds that second year. The all-chalk aspect of this iteration puts a vanilla exclamation point on a tournament titled March Madness. 

Still, it’s for the best. These four dominated the competition all season as the clear elite, almost exclusively losing only to each other. It’s a claim proven both by the way they tore through the NCAA tournament and by how their No. 2-seeded counterparts didn’t live up. That Iowa and Vanderbilt, the No. 2s in the best conferences in the country, exited early is proof enough. 

The quad’s separation from the next tier is wide. They’re in their own stratosphere in net rating, touched only by LSU. The lowest of that quintet is UCLA at 39.3, a full 10 points higher than the sixth-place TCU (29.7). They are four of the five best offenses, while UConn, Texas and South Carolina are three of the five best defenses. (A foreshadow: UCLA comes in 20th in this stat.) 

The undefeated Huskies advanced with an average winning margin of 32.5 over four NCAA tournament games. UCLA did it at 27 points, pulling away from Duke in the fourth quarter of their Sacramento 2 regional final. Texas led Michigan by as many as 40 points in the Fort Worth 3 regional, sending its average margin to 35.5. And South Carolina, after a 26-point win over TCU, posted an average winning margin of 40.25 over the four games.

It’s not that these four are entitled to reach the final weekend. It’s that we deserve to see which one is the best after the year they’ve had — and the year the others haven’t. The beauty of March Madness is the chaos. We crave the upsets, the buzzer-beaters, the shock of an unlikely underdog showing its merit on the grandest stage. 

What happens is that the latter rounds become watered down and nap-worthy. Maybe a lower seed is good for one upset, winning on a standout scout, a beneficial matchup, or, in some cases, a mind-numbing miscue. That they can keep up in the long run is less likely. 

Wouldn’t you rather watch three games between the best teams in the country than cross your fingers that a Cinderella can compete? There have been enough uncompetitive games on the women’s side of late; we don’t need or want more. 

When the four were named No. 1 seeds, it was the third time the reigning Final Four competitors earned the four top spots. Those groups didn’t back it up like this one. 

The one repeat came in 1996, when No. 2 Georgia joined No. 1s Stanford, UConn and Tennessee. The Lady Vols won the title over Georgia after ousting reigning champion UConn. The Huskies had won the prior year, their first appearance and first of what currently stands as 12 national championships. That group included No. 2 seed Stanford and No. 3 seed Georgia. 

There wasn’t much consternation over the worth or order of this 2026 Final Four group. 

Texas decisively earned the No. 3 true seed over South Carolina by taking the season’s rubber match as soundly as the Longhorns did in the SEC tournament championship game. There’s an argument that UConn and UCLA could be switched, which would change the semifinal games. 

But if they both make it through as the top seeds, the UConn vs. UCLA title game will decide in no uncertain terms which of them was the better team this year. 

What more is there to want from a competition meant to determine exactly that?