Southern Virginia creeped up another spot after 4 wins in 3 days against worthy enough opponents to steal some significant points! After all, every one they played was ranked among the best 16 in the latest AVCA Poll. Those 4 victories generated a 0.85 point increase from last week, a healthy total for any team already ranked among the best 3, and enough to now sit as the #2 ranked T100 squad. Remember, it is hard for any favorite to earn even 0.2 point in a match because to do so requires playing an opponent who has a reasonable chance to defeat it. How many teams have a reasonable chance to defeat a #3, really? Winning 4 in a row was seemingly no better than 50-50 to begin the week because it was thought the Knights wouldn’t be at least a 1:5 favorite every game. However, without dropping a set, the retrospective is they apparently were even better than this on average! i.e. A 1:5 favorite wins 5 of 6, and to win 5 of 6 four consecutive times is only a 48% probability. A team not dropping a set had well more than a 48% chance to run 4 wins in the manner they did this weekend, ergo they were better than 1:5 favorites on average for these games.
There are always things I don’t like with the T100, or any other system for that matter. I wrote a post earlier in the year explicitly stating the flaws of each so readers could be aware. For now, I will pick on my preferred ELO model, the T100, and be transparent on what I expect to see happen, what I have seen happen, and why it will right itself. The best case in point is Cal-Lutheran at #10 the last two weeks. T100 is a point stealing zero sum game, so when Cal-Lu goes 16 days without playing a match, they find themselves treading water with no opportunity to earn any T100 currency. So the good teams who continue to play and win will in some cases eek their way past them. Look at the teams between #6 & #11, all log-jammed within 0.3 points of each other. It wouldn’t be a huge stretch to simply consider it a massive tie for 6th with NYU at #12, really. This was the reason for starting to identify tiers on the “Tuesdays with MORE” composite model.
Back to Cal-Lu who plays 6 teams in 4 days all at home later this week. Some of the best teams in the landscape, too. With 4,5, or 6 wins in this window any disadvantage they had in this system not playing for two weeks could be washed away, and then some. Then they will be idle for almost another 2 weeks where treading water again might create some artificial movement. With D3 allowing multiple matches per day, some really weird things can happen with scheduling. Some understandable and others not so much. For example, as of Saturday morning, Vassar had played 5 of their 7 conference matches in the UVC with their 6th scheduled for noon. There were half of the 8 teams in its conference who to that point had played just one single conference match of 7. Who schedules in such a way, and ask yourself what motivation there would be to do so, if there are no rules against such disparity? I really don’t know, but I also recognize whatever they may be isn’t necessarily sinister, either.
So there you have it. The T100 is going to be steady for most teams near the top except Cal-Lu. Massey might be wrong with a different one or two, Inside Hitter for another, and the coaches who we know act slowly, even when we think not doing so wouldn’t constitute recency bias. Especially true when the reason a team might be on their ballot to begin with was a function of some other cognitive blind spot, or any other reason that 23 humans can be in such lock-step to never have more than 24 teams on two ballots and only one or two others on just 1? All of this to simply remind everybody why the Tuesday with MORE is probably pretty good at this game because it washes away some dirt from any one of these.
No more teaching! Here it is with about 5 weeks to go in the regular season:
