March Madness: The Distaff Bracket
Our methodology here is the same, wherein we match each school in the NCAA Division I women’s basketball tournament with its House member. Since some campuses straddle one or more congressional districts, Roll Call uses each school’s admissions office ZIP code as the location by which we determine the House member who represents the school.
With a number of schools making it into both the men’s and women’s tournament, there are 25 House members who appear on both brackets.
Some other fun facts:
- While the men’s bracket had a partisan breakdown of 37 Democrats and 31 Republicans, the women’s bracket favors the GOP, 38 to 26.
- Two Republican members represent two schools in the women’s bracket: Oklahoma’s Jim Bridenstine (Oral Roberts and Tulsa) and Texas’ Bill Flores (Baylor and Texas A&M).
- There are fewer female lawmakers representing the schools in the women’s bracket (nine out of 64) than there are female lawmakers in the men’s bracket (13 out of 68).
- The four No. 1 seeds (incidentally the same four from last year’s tourney) are split evenly along partisan lines: Democrats Anna G. Eshoo (Stanford) and Joe Courtney (Connecticut) and Republicans Flores (Baylor) and Jackie Walorski (Notre Dame).
- California and Tennessee are both sending five teams (and five members each) to the big dance. Included in this group are two members representing two of the biggest perennial powerhouses in women’s basketball: Rep. John J. Duncan Jr. (Tennessee) and Eshoo (Stanford).
- Texas, Florida, New York and Oklahoma all have four schools each in the tournament. That group includes the defending national champs, Baylor, represented by Flores. Oklahoma, it should be noted, is particularly powerful per capita when it comes to women’s hoops: There are only five members in the House delegation and three of them are going dancing.
Click here to download a PDF of Roll Call’s bracket — then fill it out and email it back to us at hoh@rollcall.com by 3 p.m. ET on Friday, March 22. Winner will receive a prize!