T100 Dashboard:
After checking in on the dashboard above, I have made it my practice to look at who the swingers are likely to be, and get a sense for how frequently they might end up the “chosen ones.” The Southern Virginia tandem of Sheaffer & Brown is the first I have seen with over 50% of their team’s swings since Spotlight #1 with Misericordia’s “Big Cats!” I am not so sure how reliable a previous swing rate will be at predicting a future one for a team playing its 3rd of 4 games against AVCA top 16 teams in 48 hours. To date, the best and only AVCA ranked opponent Southern Virginia has played is Messiah, who is at #17. Of course this means every match played in the next two days by these Knights will be against an opponent ranked better than the best they’ve seen in 2024 – A tall order! Any set not won earlier playing Naz and Hobart the days before will make it more difficult to expect Sheaffer & Brown to keep that pace within such a tight window.
Vassar’s diversity will undoubtedly be on display for this epic battle with Southern Virginia, their second consecutive match on Saturday. The Brewers conclude their weekend with the Knights at 2:30 PM right after their tilt with host St. John Fisher in a contest rich with implications for determining the host of this year’s UVC tournament as its #1 Seed. However, with the depth this team seems to have year after year, 2024 being no exception, there may be less chance for any “Dead Arm” syndrome to infiltrate its ranks, even though this spotlight match is their third played in less than 20 hours against teams among the top 13 in the AVCA Poll.
The two Knights, Lancelot & William Wallace, I mean Sheaffer & Brown rather, are hitting .340 for the season, as of the writing of this post. Just 1% more efficient than the .330 clip by the 4 Brewers named below led by Jacob Kim. No paradox here as the expected win rate for Southern Virginia when these two hitters swing will be the same 1% better, 65% to 64%, as their efficiency metric suggests it should be. This is not to say the model expects these H% metrics to hold up against their respective opponents in this one, though. It isn’t as if they were produced against teams who play the game at the level each will see in their opponent on this day, is it.
To bolster this thought take note at the bottom of this next slide for neither team on the whole being expected to be above .270 for the match, and in Vassar’s case lower than .200, too. Of course, this doesn’t preclude these players from achieving close to their season long averages for efficiency, but certainly suggests a likelihood they will be curtailed some.
One of the more remarkable graphics I have seen to date is the Knights’ opponents’ hitting% against. (Red line in the top left of the graphic seen below.) Like all graphs of this type, teams playing them become less capable of functioning as its rank moves to the right. However, when extending the model to its “y-intercept” on the left, it would predict the best teams in America would only hit .100 against this defense. Now, I know the sample is still smallish and I also recognize extrapolating is risky business because they haven’t played any teams ranked better than #17 to date, but this is the first time so late in any season I have seen a teams red line strike this low. No way I take it literally, but the message is the Vassar hitters are going to need to earn every one of their kills against this tenacious D.
The efficiency graphs from above superimposed on to the same grid below shows more clearly how these two offenses are similarly efficient across the spectrum, but take note of the lighter defensive lines with their negative slopes. In particular, how much below Vassar’s the Southern Virginia defensive model lives. If the Knights are even close to playing defense against top tier teams as this model suggests, then it might be time to consider this team as not just among the best, but like Tina Turner might say, “Simply The Best!”. (Recommendation: Click that “Simply the Best” link above to see a 61 year-old Tina rocking that song at Wembley Stadium in 2000. It will brighten your day.)
These have got to be two of the “least noisiest” teams in D3. According to the AVCA coaches, Vassar is only fluctuating between 6 & 10 while Southern Virginia has been on either #3 or #4 line for 2 consecutive months. The averages with T100 and IH ranks graphed below tells the same story of two teams having unwavering perceptions by both humans and computer models alike.
The final analysis, as seen in the slide below, is always some form of merge between the T100 probability model and a hitting efficiency model, a meld between both theory and the empirical data driven by these team’s performance on the court to date. Essentially synthesizing the 3 into some construct to define what is numerically expected along the way. But the one defining X-factor having the ability to muck even the most elegant model up, as any psychologist can tell you, is the absolute uncertainty of human behavior on the system. Some of that behavior will be a consequence of the opponent’s making, maybe slightly less than the narrative we give it after the fact, too. And this is why they play the game. (Remember that the 1 in 4 chance to see a 5th set is empirical in nature, while the theoretical 35% from the table doesn’t take into account the interdependence for the ebb and flow in the game as it is played set to set with momentum shifts, strategical actions and reactions by both players and coaches, each attempting to make their contribution to the effort.)
For the first time in any Spotlight feature, and in this last Spotlight feature, the final analysis is not so final. Now, with enough data to see a visual representation of these program’s strength of schedules (SOS), I would like to add something I created earlier this week relating the same. Vassar has to this point played a schedule at least commensurate with the best 10 teams in the country, and better than no less than 8 of those ranked from #11 thru #20. Suffice it to say the Knights have played a slate of matches, so far, often seen by a typical 40th ranked team looking to challenge itself. That is until now, as they play #7, #9, #13*, and #16 on the AVCA Poll this weekend. The * is a disclaimer for Nazareth being without All-American Owen Wickens for the time being. Computer models have shown Nazareth slipping, independent of that injury, but the coaches voting in the AVCA continue to give the Golden Flyers a heavy dose of respect by keeping them at #13. Where that respect was last year when Wentworth lost Laboo, I can’t say.
This is the last Spotlight for the 2024 season. Even though I know the transition for the month of March will be something I will call “Conference Corner,” I have yet to determine exactly what direction it will take. Same for the last few weeks in April that I know should be called “Tournament Time.” I will just let the first Conference Corner theme flow from any creative instincts I have next week and use that as the model for the following 3, much like I did with Matchup Metric and Spotlight before it.
My mind at the end of these “walkabouts” of the brain, as Crocodile Dundee might call them, takes me back to Commander Tom “Stinger” Jardian with stogie in hand from an early scene of the original Top Gun movie, as he verbally lays into Maverick, “Son, your ego is writing checks your body can’t cash!” That being how I feel sometimes with these projects I become interested in doing for Frog-Jump posts. (Truth is I would be doing them anyhow, just not attempting to pretty-up the grammar a little better, is all…) I was just reminded as I looked up the Commander’s name from that first Top Gun movie, that it, like Crocodile Dundee, are both from 1986. What a year for movie making that I just randomly quote lines from two great ones in that era, at least what a 24 year-old version of myself considered great, anyhow. So I just looked them up to find they were #1 & #2 in the box office that year, both produced by Paramount Pictures, also producing “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” the same year to break into the top 10 at the box. What a good year for Paramount! I will end this post with a worthy quote from Ferris Bueller for any youngins who have hung with me thus far who weren’t around in the middle 80’s to know what the hell I am talking about right now. It being universal enough as to not need any context, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” Happy Volleyball in March everybody.
Post Match Follow Up:
Usually I write some comments here about what seemed right with the Spotlight forecast and what seemed wrong with it as I watched the game unfold. Given the players available yesterday, it certainly appears that SVU would prevail far more often than 2 of every 3 times they’d play this Vassar squad, but it matters not. They had this one opportunity available, and to say they seized the moment might just be as understated as saying Matt Anderson has been a “pretty good” player for Team USA the last decade. Especially sweet must have been the redemption this match was to the very opponent to keep them from joining the Final 4 a year ago, just a couple hundred miles from their campus.
What the Knights did on Saturday was serve notice to the D3 Men’s Volleyball Universe by sweeping arguably the best 2 teams from arguably its best conference, outscoring them 150-120. Keeping two offenses which regularly hit well above .320 to a combined .152, less than half their usual, one of them playing at home no less. Lancelot (Sheaffer) and Wallace (Brown) swung their swords with expert precision throughout, and when they were not, the likes of Percival (Bianchin), Gawain (Evans), and Galahad (Candland) ruled the court just fine, leaving little doubt for who would claim victory on this day at St. John Fisher in Rochester, NY.
Given I have more to share later today regarding the Southern Virginia ascent in 2024 to the crest of the summit of this landscape, I will finish my remarks by playing on the notion that these Knights, like those of the round table led by Arthur (Coach Tom Reynolds) are to be reckoned with the remainder of 2024. Having watched them accumulate 24 blocks in those 6 sets played against 2 of the better 10 teams in America, I am reminded of Lancelot’s take on strategic battle, having once said, “You have to study your opponent: How he moves, so you know what he’s gonna do before he does it.” That is essentially how this team approaches its defense. And it is NASTY!
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