Southern Virginia has now garnered enough support across the board to become the composite #1 team according to the MORE Model. The latest generation is down to 4 in the Gold Tier (Springfield’s loss to NP displaced it to Silver), 7 in the Silver Tier, and 8 Bronze Tier teams. With two-thirds of the season’s games already in the books and a majority of ones remaining being conference play, it is expected the experts rankings the rest of this year will have lesser movement than in the past month. In the case of the coaches poll, that is truly saying something! However, it is only natural with every subsequent game representing at most 5% of a season’s worth of games, any sudden movement by a human based ranking would be subject to a recency bias, far more now than ever before.
The AVCA Poll out today is the 10th of the season. Tracking the Top 20 every week can illustrate a “settling in” by scanning left to right observing a dampened amount of noise as time goes by. Much less relative movement since the end of January for the Top 10 teams as seen by the 23 coaches. I believe it to be the first time in history 7 teams from a single conference have been ranked in the AVCA National Coaches Poll. These teams from the UVC are bold so a reader can see the progression from having 5 teams to start, moving for a short time to 4 teams the beginning of February before back to 5, and now this week when both New Paltz and MIT sneak into view at the top right. It seems natural the only way such an event occurs would be if its strongest teams could not create a large enough gap compared to the rest in order to be in the National Championship conversation as per the latest Pond Talk post.
You must be logged in to post a comment.