How the women's belt works
A lineal championship works like a boxing title: to become the champion, you have to beat the champion. The Women's College Basketball Belt is one title, passed from team to team, game by game, since 1986.
The rules
- Where it starts. The belt starts with the reigning national champion going into the 1986–87 season: Texas, which finished 34–0 by beating USC 97–81 in the 1986 NCAA final.
- Beat the holder, take the belt. Every game counts: regular season, conference tournaments, the NCAA tournament, the WNIT and the WBIT. Home, away or neutral.
- Division I only. Both teams have to be in Division I that season. A holder that loses to a non-Division I team keeps the belt, and those games aren't title defenses.
- No ties. Basketball plays overtime until someone wins, so every belt game has a winner.
- If a holder leaves Division I, the belt goes back to the most recent earlier holder that is still playing, the same rule the men's belt and the College Football Belt use. It hasn't happened yet.
Sources
From 2002–03 on, results come from ESPN via the wehoop project (sportsdataverse, CC BY 4.0), updated automatically every few hours during the season.
The line from 1986–87 through the 2002 final (UConn 82, Oklahoma 70) was traced game by game from schools' published media guides, record books and box scores (Louisiana Tech, Tennessee, Virginia, USC, North Carolina, Stanford and many more), The Stanford Daily archives and other student newspapers, and Wikipedia season pages. For those years the data lists every game the belt holder played rather than full schedules, so season-long features like Elo ratings and conference belts start in 2002–03. Four wins by a holder whose scores haven't turned up (Arizona State over Oregon and Oregon State in February 1992; Creighton over Bradley and Northern Iowa in January 1994) are left out, which doesn't change who held the belt.
Spot a missing or wrong game? Email hello@collegebasketballbelt.com.