This week, lets look at the conferences and their teams by way of the average Z-scores from the ratings of 3 expert computer models: Massey, Inside Hitter, & T100. Viewing region by region requires digesting 3 conferences box plots at a time rather than 12. I have superimposed a normal curve on each graphic in its appropriate place based on scale so that not only can you see degrees of differences between the 3 conferences in each region, but note relative differences to the whole population of 124 teams as well.
Simulations for consecutive weeks determine how many victories each team is expected to earn for the whole season playing its remaining conference games. Providing both from March 8 & March 15 informs the changes promoted by conference games played last week, changes in T100 ratings, and natural variation in a simulation process. Win totals typically change by small amounts, but sometimes can be major. For example, when Benedictine defeated Dominican early in the week, there was little doubt it would produce more expected conference wins in simulations, but when Aurora swept Benedictine just a couple days later, giving all three a 1-1 record against each other, the advantage returned to Dominican who has so far defeated stronger conference teams than either Benedictine or Aurora.
Rather than show the whole distribution of outcomes for every team in every conference resulting from hundreds of simulations like last week, I only indicated the probability for any team to win their regular season conference title, presumably to become the #1 seed for its tournament. The mass of teams not to have at least a 1% individual chance to become the regular season champion are simply grouped together with a combined less than 1% chance. Teams whose average Z-scores (AZR) are at least 1.0 are designated with the appropriate precious metal tiers, Gold, Silver, or Bronze.
Region 1 shown above presently has two teams with AZR >1.0 including Wentworth at 1.91 and Nichols with 1.17. Each is at least a a 1:6 Favorite to win their conference’s regular season title.
Region 2 has a total of 6 teams whose AZR>1.0, all from the UVC. With New Jersey’s win over St Joseph’s this week, it becomes likely all Region 2 ranked teams by the NCAA committee in a few weeks will be members of it, too.
Region 3 has 4 teams with AZR>1, two gold, one of each silver and bronze. Perhaps the top 2 teams in D3 volleyball reside here, as their AZR’s of 1.97 & 1.91 are the highest in the whole population. They are each no worse than 1:4 favorites to win regular season titles to grab #1 seeds for their tournaments, too.
Region 4 contains four teams with AZR>1, three from the CCIW, alone. One question often creeping up in my mind is whether there is any scenario for which 3 teams from a conference of 6 could be awarded bids to the NCAA tournament. If it were to ever happen, as microscopic as the probability would be, there most certainly would have to be some carnage in the CVC and UVC to precipitate it.
What is seen below is the total view of all conferences relative to each other from left to right with the Gold, Silver, and Bronze Tiers indicated at the top to see the density of teams from each conference which fall into those categories. Remember Gold is AZR>1.67, Silver is AZR>1.33, and Bronze is AZR>1.0
When I run a simulation for any conference, I can simply press a single key stroke to play 100 seasons. I usually only notice or deal with averages or tallies for all 100 of them, rather than scan the individual results, because there just isn’t enough time. However, after running this week’s simulations I pressed that key one more time for 6 different conferences. I then proceeded to scan each of the 100 final standings the probability model had produced, looking for ones I thought would be fantastic finishes, if they went down like that. The 4 I found to be the most interesting can be seen below. These were empirically a single extreme outcome out of 100, though my guess would be their theoretical probability to be less than that.
Last year, simulations predicted better than a 50% chance for the team not to qualify for the UVC Tournament would be a AVCA ranked team from the top 15. It came to fruition. It also suggested a 1 in 3 chance it would happen as a consequence of a 3-way tie-break. It did not.
A number of times so far in 2024 I have mentioned very plausible conditions for which multiple top 10 teams in the AVCA Poll might not be competing in the NCAA Tournament. There will likely come a time in a few weeks when simulating conference tournament bracket results and the selection process outcomes that ‘plausible’ will be quantified. The NCAA BB committee will be deciding its bracket to be revealed in less than 48 hours on Selection Sunday. From my experience with it, I know in every one of the last 30 years, no less than the best 32 teams in the country were among its 64 bracketed (no less than 34 of 68 in recent years, too). Lets just hope when the smoke clears this year in D3 volleyball the best 8 are at least there, still competing. The debate to have the best 16 is not only unwinnable, I wouldn’t ever want to have it. The debate to guarantee at least the best half of however many are eligible is winnable, and should be embraced by those with the power to build protocols to guarantee that to happen.