Beginning with next year's tournament, the NCAA will place the top 16 women's basketball teams in the bracket by their true ranking, regardless of conference, the association said Monday [1].

The old rule split them up. When a conference held four of the strongest teams, the committee scattered them across the four regions so they could not meet before the Final Four. This past season stress-tested that protection: the SEC put four teams in the top eight overall seeds, with Texas third, South Carolina fourth, LSU fifth and Vanderbilt seventh [1]. Under the retired rule, the committee moved them apart. Under the new one, South Carolina and LSU could land in the same region and face each other well before the national semifinals [1].

The change is narrow. It rewrites where a small band of top seeds go, not how the field of 68 is chosen, and it applies only to teams whose conferences stack the top 16. In most years that touches a handful of programs.

Bracket arguments run ahead of the change. The complaint that the practice hands strong conferences an easy path, and the counterclaim that scrapping it punishes them, both assume a competitive outcome no game has produced. Whether the new seeding shortens any team's road, or forces a marquee matchup into an earlier round, will show up in the first bracket built under it.

-- CHARLES ASHFORD, London