College-basketball fans have long noticed that the men's and women's NCAA tournaments tend to play out a little differently. While the men's tournament routinely serves up enough stunning upsets to fill a yearly remake of "One Shining Moment," the early rounds of the women's bracket tend to play out true to seed. (Of course, there are some serious exceptions to that rule.) But does that pattern persist as the tournament advances through the second weekend?

Gelf compared the seed composition of the Final Four and Elite Eight of the two tournaments for the past 15 years—since the women's tournament expanded to 64 teams. For the Final Fours, there's not a huge difference between the sexes. Even including George Mason's run in 2005, the average seed of a men's team in the Final Four is 2.45 (and this year, obviously, the average is 1). For the women, it's 2.12.

The relative parity in the men's tournament becomes evident, though, when we look at teams that have made the Elite Eight. While the team that loses the regional finals of the women's tournament averages a 2.6 seed, the men average a 3.77 seed. In fact, since the expansion to a 64-team tournament, no double-digit seed has ever made it to the women's Elite Eight. In that time, seven double-digit seeds from the men's tournament have.

The Kansas City Star's Mechelle Voepel says the reason there are so few upsets in the women's tournament is that teams with high seeds are stocked with tournament-tested upperclassmen, while good male players go to the NBA as early as possible. Her unwritten assumption seems to be that highly-seeded men's teams are more likely to have off nights or suffer from jitters because of their lack of experience. That's possible, but I think a far more likely reason is not that the top-ranked women's teams are so good, but that the lower-ranked women's teams are so bad. A top-40 men's team can compete with a top-10 team (if not a top-five team), but a top-40 women's team can't. Only a small pool of women's teams have the talent to beat one another, which is why it probably will be a long time before there's a female version of this year's Davidson.

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