After only two days of play, the US Open women’s draw is a shell of its former self.
Ten seeds have been eliminated, only the fifth time in the 32-seed era that the number of first-round upsets has reached double digits. Four of the top ten seeds were among the victims, marking the first time since 1994 that so many top-tenners failed to reach the second round of a Grand Slam.
Things are particularly dramatic in the top half of the draw, where Serena Williams can now reach the final without playing a single top-ten opponent. In a single day of play, my (conservative) forecast of her chances of winning the tournament rose from 42% to 47%, only a small fraction of which owed to her defeat of Vitalia Diatchenko.
However, plenty of obstacles remain. Serena could face Agnieszka Radwanska or Madison Keys in the fourth round, and then Belinda Bencic–the last player to beat her–in the quarters. A possible semifinal opponent is Elina Svitolina, a rising star who took a set from Serena at this year’s Australian Open.
The first-round carnage didn’t include most of the players who have demonstrated they can challenge the top seed. Five of the last six players to beat Serena–Bencic, Petra Kvitova, Simona Halep, Venus Williams, and Garbine Muguruza–are still alive. Only Alize Cornet, the 27th seed who holds an improbable .500 career record against Serena, is out of the picture.
What’s more, early-round bloodbaths haven’t, in the past, cleared the way for favorites. In the 59 majors since 2001, when the number of seeds increased to 32, the number of first-round upsets has had little to do with the likelihood that the top seed goes on to win the tournament.
In 18 of those 59 Slams, four or fewer seeds were upset in the first round. The top seed went on to win five times. In 22 of the 59, five or six seeds were upset in the first round, and the top seed won eight times.
In the remaining 19 Slams, in which seven or more seeds were upset in the first round, the top seed won only five times. Serena has “lost” four of those events, most recently last year’s Wimbledon, when nine seeds fell in their opening matches and Cornet defeated her in the third round.
This is necessarily a small sample, and even setting aside statistical qualms, it doesn’t tell the whole story. While Serena has failed to win four of these carnage-ridden majors, she has won three more of them when she wasn’t the top seed, including the 2012 US Open, when ten seeds lost in the first round and Williams went on to beat Victoria Azarenka in the final.
Taken together, the evidence is decidedly mixed. With the exception of Cornet, the ten defeated seeds aren’t the ones Serena would’ve chosen to remove from her path. While her odds have improved a bit on paper, the path through Keys, Bencic, Svitolina, and Halep or Kvitova in the final is as difficult as any she was likely to face.