LSU women’s basketball coach Van Chancellor promised Lady Tiger fans during the team’s preseason media day that LSU would advance to the NCAA tournament.But Chancellor knows his young team still has some work to do to get into the Big Dance with just four regular season games remaining.”Boy, I tell you, it’s going to be really, really close,” Chancellor said after the team’s 66-55 loss to Auburn two Sundays ago.One of the reasons Chancellor was so concerned with his team’s tournament resume was LSU’s lack of a quality wins.Prior to LSU’s 66-47 win against Florida, the Lady Tigers were 0-6 against teams currently in the top-25 poll, with four of those losses occurring in the PMAC.LSU (13-9, 6-4) was also 0-9 against teams currently in the top 50 of the NCAA’s RPI rating, which is an index that measures the quality of a team using its record and its strength of schedule.But LSU bettered both of those records with Sunday’s win, and Judy Southard, LSU associate athletic director and a member of the NCAA tournament selection committee, said the Lady Tigers have gone a long way toward showing they are among the top 64 teams in the country.”They overcame one big obstacle [Sunday] and got themselves a signature win on their resume,” she said. “That Florida win helps them a lot. But the key thing is now, and I think the coaching staff understands this, is that now they’ve got to take things one game at a time because it’s a critical time of the year.”Southard said although LSU lost many of its games against top-level competition, some of the Lady Tigers’ near misses will earn them recognition on selection Sunday.”The most impressive thing about LSU’s schedule is the quality of teams they’ve played and the numbers of those teams they’ve played,” she said. “While they don’t have a lot of wins against those teams, you can certainly look at those games and those scores and see that they competed and played tough. They probably played Connecticut better than anybody in the country, and that was a nationally televised game, so those kinds of things are taken into consideration as well.”LSU’s current position is new to senior forward Kristen Morris.Morris has spent her three previous seasons on teams that were No. 1 or No. 2 seeds in the NCAA tournament. The Lady Tigers’ lone senior said the key to getting into the field of 64 will be building on the team’s current high point.”We’ve been anxious for one of these wins for a long time,” she said. “Now we want to play off this momentum and carry it to the rest of the season.”One factor that won’t influence LSU’s attempt to reach the NCAA tournament is geography.The PMAC is set to host the opening weekend of the tournament, which Southard said doesn’t affect on who makes it into the tournament.”That has absolutely no weight,” she said. “There are two things that do not carry any weight in the committee room and that is conference affiliation and then the schools who are hosting.”Southard said for the Lady Tigers to advance to the field of 64, they will need to finish the season with momentum.”I think they will need to perform well in the final four regular season games and then make a good showing in the conference tournament,” she said.
 
 
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