Four big questions that will impact women's NCAA bracket - ESPN

The Pac-12 is gone. USC and UCLA are in the Big Ten — and are the conference favorites. And Texas should be South Carolina's biggest challenge to a fourth consecutive SEC regular-season title.

Call 2024-25 the season of change in women's college basketball. All of it will take some getting used to. None of it rolls off the tongue yet.

The ACC and Big Ten now have 18 teams. The Big 12 and SEC have 16. With a higher concentration of good teams in fewer leagues, expect the records for the number of NCAA tournament bids each conference receives to be broken. The percentage of teams advancing to March Madness from each conference will be the new standard.

The NCAA women's basketball committee has also made changes to its selection criteria. Most notably, the committee will shift to the quad system that the men have used for seven years to measure the quality of a win or a loss. The quad system replaces NET top-25 and top-50 wins and sub-100 NET losses. The NET remains the basis for the rankings the selection committee uses, but they will be qualified differently.

Women's Bracketology will cover these nuances all season long. Come back every Tuesday for weekly projections through December. We'll offer multiple updates each week starting in January.

With opening day complete and the first Bracketology of 2024-25 out, this is a good time to look at four key questions that will impact the selection process right into Selection Sunday on March 16.

Good wins are still good wins. That doesn't change. The teams that win more games against quality opponents will be rewarded with higher seeds. But the quad system more specifically categorizes the quality of home, road and neutral site games.

In the past, teams that played road or