How Portland’s stunning upset of Gonzaga impacts the women’s NCAA tournament bracket

You might be asking, what is a bid-stealer?

It’s best defined as a team from typically a one-bid, mid-major league that wins its conference tournament when it wasn’t supposed to, meaning that the team that was projected to win that league — but didn’t — has a resume good enough for an at-large bid, turning that league into a two-bid one, which will bump a team off the bubble.

And that’s exactly what we have here. Gonzaga was going to make the NCAA tournament regardless of what happened in the WCC title game. The Zags were 12th in NET on Tuesday and had 30 wins, including over the likes of Stanford, South Dakota State, Alabama, and two over Portland in the regular season.

But Portland needed to win the WCC tournament to punch a ticket into the Big Dance. And so, the WCC becomes a two-bid league. Gonzaga will surely get an at-large bid, and Portland takes the automatic qualifier spot.

Bid-stealers are bad news for teams on the bubble. Think about those Power 5 teams with about 20 wins that finished middle-of-the-pack in their league. For example, ESPN’s Charlie Creme believes that Portland’s win means that Mississippi State will end up on the wrong side of bubble and out of the field of 68.