What a great 5th weekend of volleyball it was! Some major “upsets” among the “Blue Bloods,” but less among the rest. The Match-Up Metric with the perceived best contests to watch last week came back to where it had been expected to be for some time. This week going 6-5 and finishing the month at a respectable 32-10. A 76% clip for the closest matches each week is a little lucky when you stop and consider every one had a less than 80% chance for the favorite to win, many in the 50’s.
For the month of February, I will be doing a single in depth “Spotlight” match for the weekend instead of the Match-up Metric. Now that a quarter of the regular season games are in the books for 2024, the chance to dig into them is too good to pass up. This week I intend to do a deeper dive into a Saturday match between the T100’s #17 and #20 ranked teams, Baldwin Wallace and Misericordia. They are playing each other at 11:00 AM on Saturday at the inaugural Statemen Volleyball Classic at Hobart’s Bristol Gymnasium. Both play Hobart the day before on Friday, but Misericordia has the privilege to test their mettle against Wentworth later that evening before these teams get to it the next morning. BW’s privilege to do the same (play Wentworth that is…) follows their 11 AM tilt against the Lions on Saturday. Check in the end of the week to see the analysis called “Spotlight,” especially if that match is on your radar.
There was some significant shifting amongst the top 30 this week, as well as some major movers after that. Teams such as Buffalo St., Stevenson, and Arcadia certainly made some magic happen, as did Santa Cruz reverse sweeping the Cardinals from St. John Fisher, right before being mildly shocked by the Buff St. Bengals comeback to turn the tables back on them! Click here for the whole list of T100 teams, and see the top 10 below:
| RANK | TEAM | CONF | RATING |
| 1 | Stevens | MAC | 17.80 |
| 2 | Wentworth | GNAC | 17.68 |
| 3 | Springfield | IND | 17.50 |
| 4 | Southern Va. | CVC | 17.34 |
| 5 | Vassar | UVC | 16.86 |
| 6 | Loras | CCIW | 16.57 |
| 7 | Cal Lutheran | IND | 16.09 |
| 8 | North Central (IL) | CCIW | 15.96 |
| 9 | Juniata | CVC | 15.93 |
| 10 | St. John Fisher | UVC | 15.87 |
Checking out the T100, you may have noticed a new column on the end called P(NB). This is the probability for a team to qualify for the National Tournament by earning a National Bid (NB). Every team has two opportunities to arrive there, the first through either an automatic qualification (AQ) by winning their conference tournament, or otherwise a Pool B bid having not been eligible for an AQ. After that, the third ring in this circus will be who gets the last two at-large bids from the same committee choosing Pool B qualifiers. If you want to see the most likely to get there in order of their chances to do so you can click here. Also, some explanation for how it is built can be found there.
Last week I created a composite ranking by using all 3 of the major experts ratings, together with the AVCA Coaches poll. I called it “MORE.” It stands for the Median Order Rank by Experts. Once per month I will post “MORE” so readers can see what I believe could be the most authentic rank order of teams having the least amount of noise. Like all of the graphics and tables moving forward, I will link this one here so that the display can be more pleasing than the site editor allows. So sorry to those who use their phones, as I tried that this weekend while away and was horrified by what I didn’t see! Lesson learned!
The above is all the run-of-the-mill analytic “stuff” many enjoy, as do I. For anybody who has appreciated reading the curiosity pieces I have written the first month, I hope to put one out per week, still. Just waiting for the wackiness to begin again this week to give me inspiration. Been thinking a little about the game theory behind Black – Jack recently, and how it relates to these games we love to watch so much. Maybe see where that goes?