Big Ten women’s basketball coaches opt for strategy, not symmetry

The Big Ten women’s basketball coaches saw one question coming a mile away. On Sept. 18, the conference announced that men’s basketball would adopt an 18-team conference tournament. In last year’s inaugural expansion season with USC, UCLA, Oregon and Washington, both the men and women only had 15 teams quality. The strongest initial reaction to the conference’s decision to abandon that strategy for the men — but not the women — was criticism of the double standard.

USC Trojans head coach Lindsay Gottlieb thought otherwise, and applauded the conference for the decision.

“I think their ability to not have us do just what the men are doing is actually very progressive for us,” Gottlieb told reporters.

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For it to make sense, there is a more important number than 18. It’s 12, the number of Big Ten schools to qualify for the 2025 NCAA Tournament — a women’s March Madness record.

After the 2024-25 season, when coaches came together to talk with the conference, they had the opportunity to vote on decisions that impact Big Ten competition. The conversations included tournament expansion. Gottlieb led the charge against an 18-team women’s basketball Big Ten field.

“If you put an additional game or two, or however it would work with 18 teams, you risk those teams taking a bad loss and not making it,” Gottlieb told reporters. “We very likely would have had less teams in the NCAA tournament last year had we played the additional game. So it just doesn’t make sense for where our conference is at. We are the strongest women’s basketball conference, and there was also a really big difference between the teams that didn’t make it record-wise, and the ones that did.”

There are arguments against the Big Ten as the “strongest” conference in the country with no national championship since Carolyn Peck’s 1999 run with the Purdue Boilermakers, but from the top down, 12 teams qualifying warrants hyperbole.

So, despite the history and occasional cinderella conference tournament run, many can agree that the real excitement comes from March Madness. Not only the excitement but the money.

In January 2025, the NCAA Convention voted to approve payment for teams that make the annual nationwide competition. That money, paid directly to the conference to divide as they see fit, equals about $113,000 for each team that makes the tournament. The payout increases as teams advance further through the bracket.

The Big Ten already made $1.36 million dollars from the women’s tournament before the first tipoff.

That number climbs when teams move on in the tournament, and 10 of the 12 teams won at least one game of March Madness. While only three teams made it out of the second round, getting less teams into the tournament hurts the bottom line. The other Big Ten teams competing near the top of the conference agree.

“Look at us last year, really, I don’t know how many of us were just at a jug bottleneck [in the conference standings] … It was a tie or one game, so you had to win some in that Big Ten tournament,” Iowa Hawkeyes head coach Jan Jensen told reporters. “It protected your best teams, and if everything stays status quo, we should be able to get in that amount of teams into the next year’s tournament.”

It is easy to imagine that teams who consistently make the tournament would love the idea of protecting their place in March Madness. It is hard to imagine someone at UCLA, Ohio State or Michigan pushing to add more teams to the tournament, and hurting their chances.

Look at the 2025 edition of the Big Ten Tournament and there was effectively an NCAA Tournament play-in game between the Washington Huskies and Minnesota Golden Gophers on the first day of tournament play. No. 12 Washington defeated No. 13 Minnesota and cemented its spot in the First Four of March Madness. Minnesota went on to win the WBIT, further supporting the “strongest” moniker.

What about the teams who barely made the Big Ten field or not at all? The talking points were clear on Big Ten media day.

“There are things that women’s basketball should do that don’t necessarily transfer to the men’s side,” Rutgers head coach Coquese Washington told reporters. “So I think that the great thing about our conference is that they’ve allowed both women’s basketball and men’s basketball to do what’s in the best interest of our respective sports.”

Rutgers was the lowest-seeded team in the Big Ten Tournament and lost to the Nebraska Cornhuskers in the first round. Penn State head coach Carolyn Kieger, whose team ended the season in last place in the Big Ten, echoed the same sentiments.

When it came time to vote, the coaches and athletic directors chose to move forward with 15 teams for the women and 18 teams for the men.

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The men, who had eight teams qualify, moved to 18 because some teams needed the extra help, a last chance grab, at a spot in the NCAA Tournament. The women, frankly, don’t need it.

“It becomes a source of motivation for teams. You know, the regular season matters, right?” Washington told reporters. “The regular season all those games, they matter. You have to be ready day game one, and you’ve got to come with your best effort every night. Because every everybody wants to be one of those 15.”

For the handful of teams near the bottom of the Big Ten who don’t get an automatic spot in the conference tournament, they have a goal. They have something to fight for.

“Everyone wants as many participation opportunities as possible, but from a financial standpoint, mainly from an analytics standpoint, it’s not better for the good of the entire conference to go to 18 right now,” Gottlieb told reporters.

What about the players? Staying put at 15, for the USC Trojans, was not on any of Gottlieb’s players’ radars, according to the coach.

The change works for the conference, coaches and players. The only counterpoint against an 18-team tournament is that it’s college sports. It’s about the tradition and pageantry of basketball and the chance for anyone to make their mark in the postseason.

Walk around Big Ten media day and there is no tradition, there is no pageantry — it’s all business.