Below is the actual bracket prepared by the committee for today’s selection show. It seems the undefeated Knights from Southern Virginia, having lost just 3 sets all year, go to the #3 hole because of a comparatively weaker schedule than our top two seeds, Stevens & Wentworth. SOS also seems to be part of the reason for Vassar getting the first at-large to Juniata, who likely was awarded the second and final one as a result of its head-to-head win against Carthage on 2/1 at the inaugural FJ Invite this year. Everything else in the bracket is essentially equivalent to what was thought yesterday, short of a role reversal for St. Joseph’s and Baruch in the bottom right regional. Can’t hardly blame the committee for that! Why wouldn’t we all want to see a rematch of NYU vs. Baruch from January 25th of this year? It was the second most rare 5 setter mathematically possible, 4 of 5 sets going extra points and one a mere 25-23, all two point margins, and so unlikely we will be into the 22nd century the next time it happens! Unless of course these two teams have something similar planned for us in just a few days, that is. The consequence of delighting us with this rematch is the other half of this regional where St. Joseph’s gets matched up with Southern Virginia just 24 months after these same two teams met in a first rounder where St. Joes, the #12 in that 2022 tournament, defeated the #5 Southern Virginia Knights. A first and only ever #12 over a #5 seed in the D3 Tourney history! I am sure many players from that match will still be on the court later this week, too. Thank you to the committee for these two, in particular.
You can see the T100 probabilities for teams advancing in this bracket, based on their T100 ratings right now, on the table below. Of course, as wins occur against better opponents, these ratings will evolve, altering chances for success along the way. I hope to keep up with an Elite 8 & Final 4 generation of something similar. Yesterday morning, I lamented the fact that a Baruch vs. NYU rematch couldn’t be forthcoming, given Vassar seemed a strong favorite to win the UVC at home, but the stars aligned making sense to make NYU a #6 seed, and it seemed only natural for Baruch & St. Joe’s to flip flop what was thought to be the #11 & #14 lines to get the first round rematches from earlier this season and from the 2022 tournament, each with a compelling storyline. For the most part I haven’t changed too much of the narratives offered below from what was written yesterday morning, for those that read them already.
Carthage, the #7 AVCA team last week, one spot ahead of Vassar, before they each lost their conference final, turned out to be the conference team most discriminated against, partly as a consequence of contradictory logic behind the number of Pool B bids offered this year. One part in a process of no less than 4 rules seemingly making sense independent of the others, which in combination create confounding results. It is the first time in history a team better than 10th ranked in the country did not get invited to a 16 team tournament. (This year, there was also a 2nd among the current AVCA Top 10 not to get an invite for the first time ever.) The fact that the NCAA SOS metric is biased against Midwest teams may or may not have been a factor, too. I sure wish the NCAA would get its mathematical “ducks in a row.”
However, it is noted that if Nichols would have simply been offered a conference automatic bid, like every other conference, certainly the same 16 teams would have been playing this year. (Assuming Pool B & C would have received 2 bids apiece, I think it plausible to believe Vassar & Juniata would have still been chosen for the same reasons.) The truth of the matter, at the outset of the season, Nichols being a part of a conference not being awarded an automatic bid in the 2nd year of a waiting period, could have had a better chance to arrive in the National Bracket this year than if it’s conference was awarded one. Think about it for a minute from a January 10th perspective. Their mindset may have been, “I must produce a better season than at least one of 3 teams, including Springfield who I play twice, and my fate will be based on my whole body of work playing all these teams, rather than a single elimination tournament at year’s end playing two matches against the best teams in my conference.” Any team in the UVC would sign up for that in a heartbeat, I think? Part of me wishes Springfield would have joined Vassar and the others at 1000 Oaks that first weekend in January when they were out in Cali playing D1 teams just 80 miles down the road from where some great D3 matches were taking place at Cal -Lu. I guess that kind of discretion is part of the privilege for being an Independent. That and a complicit NCAA rule regarding Pool B which populates itself using contradictory logic.
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