The four programs at the top of the T100 have separated themselves as the elite of the elite. With about 6 weeks to go before the Final Four is locked in, it is difficult to fathom any one of them not having punched their ticket on April 20th. However, with the quality of teams among the top 10, it would be foolhardy to ever predict such a thing. The fact still remains, it is impossible for all teams from this top 10 to even be invited to the NCAA Tournament this year because the CVC, UVC and CCIW each have 2 of its members there.
~ T100 post on March 10, 2024 on FJ
Countdown to the Final Four weekend goes something like this: 7, 6, 5, 4 3 2, 1
With NYU at +600 (6 to 1 against), Vassar at +300 (3 to 1 against), and Cal-Lu arguably at +110 (11 to 10 against), especially given Loras’ difficulty in dispensing #13 Trine the day before on their home court, we were all given a very rare day in Men’s NCAA D3 Volleyball Tournament history on Saturday. Like, so rare, it’s never happened before, and it was approximately 20 times less likely to have occurred than having all of us, in a parallel universe, getting ready to watch the top 4 seeds get after it this Friday, instead! Surely, it was what some might even refer to as a Three Dog Night – Joy to the world!
For those too young to remember, “Joy to the World” was Billboard’s #1 song in North America for 6 weeks back in 1971 and sung by the band 3 Dog Night, and since then it has found its way on to soundtracks of two movies in my top 10, “The Big Chill” & “Forrest Gump.” For those who played the Trivia Game at the end of “A Gift to the Juniata Faithful” and keeping count, you now know every one of my Top 10 movies, all time. The next one I say is in my Top 10 makes 11! Speaking of movies, I recommend “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” hitting theatres three days ago. Had to wait until Sunday to go see it because of my volleyball habit. Worth the wait, given what was available for my viewing pleasure on Friday & Saturday. However, it is not among my top 10 all-time, even though worth both the time and the cost to go see – It was a 3:50 pm matinee for me. I guess y’all will have to wait to find out the 11th in my top 10 all-time at some later post. Maybe more trivia? LOL
What a joy Saturday was on the whole! Not as dramatic as the 5th set in Hoboken with Juniata’s relentless siding-out to deprive Springfield on Friday, though. Probably an opinion not so surprising since it was the source of my next day’s post, explicitly breaking it down from 5-3 in the 5th and on, but certainly the overall competitive nature from start to finish on Saturday was enough to rival it. For me, Saturday felt like the 8 year-old version of myself letting a Wild Cherry Lifesaver melt in my mouth as I savored it until it disappeared. That 5th set with Juniata & Springfield on Friday was more like that same 8 year-old me deciding to pop that first one in my hypoglycemic, sugar craved mouth to chomp down hard for a Wild Cherry fix like none other ever experienced since, making me tingle from head to toe with instant energy, short-lived though it might have been! Both tremendous in their own right. Yeah, pretty special weekend, for sure. Both days!
I got to thinking about the fact 3 of those 4 Saturday matches went the distance with its victor winning by just 2 points in the 5th. It dawned on me the same thing happened in two of the first eight matches in round #1, too. Part of me can’t help wondering, “If Stevens doesn’t run 5 in a row at the end of set #2 to win 25-23, might Juniata have been able to find its magic from the night before to have completed the most improbable “Pick 4” quarterfinals in the history of all of sport?
Earlier this season when Baruch defeated our most unlikely Final 4 qualifier from a couple days ago, NYU, I wrote an article called “Manhattan Mania,” specifying the probability of all 5 sets going to extra points. (In the Baruch vs. NYU match on January 25th, 4 of 5 sets did, and the other was still a 2 point affair, which is what made it a once in a century kind of event.) The question I ask myself now is, “What are the chances any D3 match goes to a 5th set tie-breaker to then end with a 2 point victor?” I created a Venn Diagram to illustrate an attempt to answer this. Though not as cool as the Serving Demand Venn from last week’s post, I did make it so this one’s area apportionment is also geometrically consistent with the probabilities depicted for visual & mindful accuracy.
Turns out the empirical probability for a 2 point 5th set based on matches played this season is 4%, i.e. just 1 in 25. (*Extra points wins in the 5th is half that, 2%, i.e. 1 in 50.) To be fair, though, contests between the 1 vs. 9; 2 vs. 7; 3 vs. 6; and 4 vs. 5 aren’t exactly like your typical “run of the mill” regular season matches, many of which whose outcomes have very little doubt before a first serve even takes place. However, approximately 1 in 3 of all matches in the regular season might be comparable with their T100 differences, so how about we settle on that probability being three times more for this reason, about 12%. Now I can ask a question I am far more interested in answering, “What’s the chances 3 of 4 quarterfinals end up that way on the same day in a 4 hour window?” Using an old friend named “Bernoulli,” though most call it binomial probability nowadays, it is easy enough to figure out to be .00629. This means we spectators were lucky enough to witness something on Saturday night that had about a 1 in 160 chance of happening. But knowing it was at least a “Three Dog Night,” makes it closer to 1 in 500, too. i.e. It is surprising dogs won all 3, on top of considering every 5-set match played, also ended in a 2 point margin. Just like the two on Friday did. Makes what happened on the weekend in 5-set matches akin to a MLB batter getting a hit in 5 consecutive at bats, where no less than 3 were doubles, too. Unlikely on many fronts.
On the weekend as a whole, the chances for 5 in 12 matches going down in this same manner was roughly 1 in 700, and that isn’t even accounting for the fact Hiram, Lancaster Bible, and St. Joes playing the top 3 teams in the land to within 2 points of a victory is nowhere near a 12% zip-code! We were offered a mighty wonderful gift of competitive balance this weekend. In the 9 matches forecasted with a favorite having less than 97% probability to win a match, 5 of them went to a 5th set 2 point winner. Now, that 1 in 500 for just Saturday, calculated above, morphs closer to 1 in 5,000 for the whole weekend, given 2 of 5 matches on Friday even were in the realm of this possibility to go down in such a manner! Bloody Hell – That’s more than half! (Did I mention “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” is a Guy Ritchie film?) Should anything resembling this happen in the 3 remaining matches over the next 5 days, it would be time to go buy a lotto ticket, because that’s the territory we’d be approaching, folks.
A RIPPLE EFFECT USING THE INFINITY STONES TO CHANGE JUST ONE OUTCOME
In the ultimate game of “What If?” I can’t help wondering what happens if Vassar defeats NYU in the UVC final 8 days ago. NYU was “clobbered” the first set in such a way that anybody forecasting NYU to win the next 3 in a row at that moment would be worthy of serious psychological intervention. Even NYU, themselves, were probably thinking about 3 of the next 4 as opposed to 3 in a row at the time.
It seems likely that NYU was going to be in the NCAA tournament as the #9 seed playing Springfield, even if they lost the UVC, because they had defeated Carthage & St. John Fisher during the season, already. Equally likely that Vassar would have then been the #6 seed where NYU ended up. Of course, this would have made Juniata the #8 seed to play NYU, thus depriving us of one of the finest finishing sets anybody could ever imagine. Even if NYU comes out of that match, defeating Stevens in Hoboken just doesn’t happen. Stevens is 8 for 8 getting to the Final 4 when in this tournament the last decade, never not having arrived there when a regional host throughout all of history! Vassar’s role as a #6 seed at Washington & Lee University doesn’t get them where they are now, either, I think. The only way Southern Virginia doesn’t win a regional is if they play a defense almost on par with their own, and that is what happened! Vassar doesn’t possess that and NYU does. So both these UVC participants in this present Final 4 should be happy as a pig in mud that their UVC final match went the way it did because of this alternative. Ironic as hell, if you ask me.
A Springfield retrospective as a presumed #7 seed, given that Vassar had won the UVC in this alternate universe, gets to play Nichols again for a third time. That would have been fun to see if Nichols would have finally got over the top, but based on what I observed against Juniata, Springfield would have probably been the one playing at Wentworth on Saturday. My guess is Wentworth will never take a late time slot on a Friday evening again as a regional host, nor will any team in the future, either. (I was informed no team in the past had until last week when I asked that very question about Wentworth playing later – My hypothesis was it allowed more of their fans to attend?) Anyhow, playing Wentworth in a regional final, for Springfield, if they had defeated Nichols, makes it monumentally more likely for it to arrive in a Final 4 rather than through Stevens as it was orchestrated in our timeline. (See the above regarding Stevens & Final Fours!) I am not sure who wins, but my money would have been on Wentworth over Springfield, even more so than I believed it matched up against Vassar – Maybe 80-20 vs. the Pride as opposed to the 75-25 against the Brewers. Sure would have wanted to watch that serving game if it had been Springfield at Wentworth in a regional final, though! And finally, even should Juniata defeat NYU in the #8 vs. #9 match in this Marvel- like multiverse, it likely doesn’t change what actually happened in this timeline string, Steven’s winning 3-1 in their quarter.
IS SERVE AGGRESSION ALWAYS THE BETTER ANSWER?
An interesting pattern I noticed in a graphic I offered last week before the Sweet 16.
I am not saying the terminal totals in the games the 3 teams circled on the lower left lost are screaming this in any conclusive manner. However, what I did note, for example, is that Springfield had 38% of all its serving errors in set #5 when they performed only 18% of its serves, more than twice the error frequency in the last set than the 4 others played. Their added aggression led to 7 terminal serves in their last 15, erroring 5 times to its 2 aces. And what did they get for it? They got 25% of its aces (a little better than 18%, admittedly), and earned just 1 out of 18 points Juniata passed, either in system or out. That doesn’t seem like a good trade off. Sure the sample size is small and the alternate hypothesis that fatigue contributed is also plausible, but what if?
I haven’t looked closely at the ebb and flow of terminal points in the Wentworth and the Southern Virginia loss, but I did note that NYU hit .075 below the Knights H% to still win the match, even though my eye test kept marveling at their propensity to keep balls alive that had little business being in play. The win with a lower H% by .075 is in such rarified air it requires explanation, some of which may very well be linked to a terminal game mentality across different moments in this match. Vassar did outhit Wentworth by a smidge, and there was nothing in the overall match data raising a red flag as it pertains to terminal serves. But again, the aggregate aces and serve errors can often blur a storyline, until digging in to the ebb and flow of who, what, where, when, why, and how.
I know this is a site dedicated to D3 ball, but I would like to take a moment to bring up something I learned watching Penn St. defeat St. Francis a month ago. They played two consecutive days and both matches went 5, as Penn St. came back in each after being down 2-1 both times. Ten sets and 407 points played, with almost one-third of them being terminal serves is a decent sample. Penn St. outscored St. Francis 212 to 195, overall. They lost live balls 136 to 139. St. Francis is highly aggressive adhering to the motto, “Serving errors don’t lose matches.” All I can say about what I saw and how it all shook out from my vantage point, “St. Francis’ aggression at the stripe produced 3 more aces than Penn State at the cost of 23 additional errors over 10 sets. (Really 9 if you think of set #5’s as each a half?) I am hard pressed to believe any additional points they generated in the live-ball game due to that aggression compensated for terminal margins this diverse.
This whole vein of thought is why I began looking at creating a valid serving metric. A couple years ago I studied USA playing France in the VNL to see that USA aced France once to its 14 service errors. They really were desperate to get France out of system. Rightfully so, as I determined they were 2.5 times more likely to win a serving point when they did. However, the 16 times they did that, I was convinced was not enough of a reward for the risk it turned out to have been. I recognize this is a retrospective, and hindsight is 20-20. Certainly as opponents get better at passing, maybe even by more than those who serve improve that skill, there could become a point, at the highest levels, when tactics regarding aggression at all costs might no longer be the all-inclusive norm.
In baseball, hitters and pitchers improve at varying rates throughout history, making it necessary to alter the game. In the late 60’s they lowered the mound after Bob Gibson and others posted ridiculous ERA’s. There have been times MLB has changed the make-up of the ball, and certainly distances to fences were made shorter to increase homeruns having also taken place over time. Recently they put a clock on the pitchers to increase the speed of the game, and they found run production increased 8% and hitters hit for a better average, particularly lefties, even though the goal was primarily to shorten the length of games. My point here is that there is less that can be done to alter the game of volleyball by changing the conditions for which it is played. If serving and passing skills continue to improve, and do so at different rates over time, it wouldn’t be surprising to me if passing a ball improves at a faster rate than serving it. Especially If the conditions of the size and make-up of the ball remain consistent to what they are now. This because we have near certainty the conditions of the court aren’t changing any time soon!
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