Congratulations to the Cal Lutheran Men’s Volleyball team for meeting every challenge along the way to culminate an astounding ’24 season with a 3-0 victory over Vassar in the National Championship on Sunday. Most reading this post watched the game to see exactly how it played out, not needing any insight to know Vassar was right there in the hunt, making it deceptively closer than the image a 3-0 on a bracket conjures up. They weren’t able to get over the top in any set, particularly the third. Mostly because Cal Lu’s magnificent heart shown on Friday gave way to a mindful and relentless pursuit by refusing to allow Vassar’s grit to get them on the board. Maybe the Kingsmen were inspired by a memory of Dominican earlier this year or Loras last week on this same court, when both times they sprinted to a two set lead, only to hang on by a deuce in the 5th, not wanting to revisit that hollow feeling again.
I believe the lesson most vivid in their mind at the moment was its own response two days previous against Stevens, going down 0-2. From most vantage points not their own, it was thought they were even more “dead in the water” then, than Vassar being down 0-2, now. Recognizing if they could do it, so could Vassar, too. So Cal Lu found themselves playing the role of Stevens from two days ago, and having experienced the last act of this play, they certainly didn’t wish to watch it again from a different seat in the house. A keen Kingsmen’s eye of the tiger required a kind of ruthlessness in going for the jugular of Vassar to end this match sooner than later. It may even have been cultivated playing Santa Cruz a third time, being down 0-2 three weeks earlier, before coming back to earn their first reverse sweep. The stakes for Cal Lu on that day being far less than those for the Banana Slugs, but it mattered not. The championship match between the Brewers and the Kingsmen was almost as close as any sweep can possibly be, Vassar only being outscored by 7 points over 3 sets. In fact, out of the almost 900 sweeps all season long, I found just one closer, right at the minimum possible 6 points. (Aurora over Mt. Union 27-25; 25-23; 26-24 on 2/23/24, with Mt. Union scoring exactly 48% of the points on that day, compared to Vassar with 47.6% in the championship match less than 48 hours ago.)
Cal Lutheran’s schedule is reminiscent to a career arc of a professional prize fighter, front loaded with matches intended to set the stage for the high stakes to come. It played 20 of its 28 regular season matches in the first 37 days, before playing just 6 times in the next 47 days, all of those in a 4 day span, hosting its Cal-Lu Fornia Invitational. Similar to Mike Tyson fighting 28 times in his first two years before settling in to defend his Heavy Weight World Championship title roughly 3 times a year later in his career. I’m not familiar with Cal-Lu’s practice schedule over these long midseason breaks between matches, as seen on the timeline below, but you can bet I sure would be! There is something to be said about keeping a team hungry by playing less after what metaphorically amounts to a series of grueling dress-rehearsals in a basement auditorium, perfecting the show for opening night! Maybe planning a season’s schedule for a volleyball team, like a trainer prepares a “High Intensity Training” session for his/her client, has some merit, after all? As a former swimming coach, my season plans often had some remarkable similarities to what I see below, one reason I’d be interested in how Coach Judd prepared his practice plans in the mid season, particularly in response to exactly what he saw his team most needed to improve from those first 20 matches in order to end up right where he intended.
With its 5 consecutive Cinco-Deuces (A 5-set match whose tiebreaker set ends with a 5th set 2 point margin) in this years tournament’s 4 quarters & 2 semi matches over a mere 6 days, when throughout the whole history of this tournament it has produced this same number 5 in 66 quarter and semis over 11 years, the championship match was bound to present a bit of a “let down.” Realizing later, any leverage for a championship moment by both teams wouldn’t be hanging by a thread a sixth consecutive time.
My guess is nobody knows the 6 lower seeded dogs winning Cinco-Deuces in this year’s tournament is 3 times more than the 2 dogs ever having done so in tournament history. And it is with great empathy, I’ll share the fact one of those two favorites in history to lose a gut wrenching match in this way was also among the 6 programs this year to have been favored, only to again be defeated in the same agonizing way. An event that happened once every 6 years previous, took place 6 times over 6 days in this year’s tourney! I guess that is to be expected when a 1 in 77 Million event smacks you upside the head. FYI – The overall 7 Cinco-Deuce Matches out of this year’s 15 total matches (47%) is only one shy of the 8 that appeared in 119 matches (7%) previous to this year. A part of me remains in a funk because the championship match was not able to add to this lore, even if at the same time, not being surprised by it ending in the same score (3-0) more than half of all matches in history had been. (61 out of 119 – 51%)
A primary function for my role at Frog-Jump this year was producing the T100 Ranking. It has gone through 3 iterations in the last 3 years, no doubt looking at a 4th looming now that we are into the off-season. One thing I need to consider moving forward is how to deal with teams that go 3 weeks or more without playing matches? Something I hadn’t considered before. A system that depends on matches played for stealing and relinquishing points based on their probabilities made it so a team like Cal Lu would oscillate between 5th and 10th in the middle of 2024, before this latest run of 4 wins, 2 as a dog, put them on par with Stevens’ point total.
Another consideration I made perfectly clear in my original post back in January was how important a pre-season ranking is for any system to find its dynamic equilibrium (truth) earlier rather than later. I don’t want to wait for half the season to go by before I can have confidence in who is where, and why. Besides, a rating system isn’t suppose to be an “Atta Boy” for a job well done in the past, as much as it is hopefully a tool to predict the likelihood for what’s to come. This is the reason it took so little time for Stevens to retake the #1 ranking after its loss to Wentworth in the T100, while the Coaches Poll didn’t budge off that spot for many weeks. It was just one match, and Wentworth’s H% wasn’t as high as Stevens in that loss, either. A phenomenon only happening roughly once in every 25 match winners – It happened when NYU defeated SVU, and even when Cal Lu outlasted Stevens, too. Both of these winners hit about .070 less than the teams they defeated, if memory serves?
Sometimes it becomes necessary to look back in order to move forward. Consider the following:
I certainly need to digest who the preseason missed by looking into the above. However, there is nothing wrong with checking in on who it didn’t miss when the smoke cleared, either. Sometimes that is the only way to improve your game. Knowing exactly where it is getting the job done as well as where it isn’t. The reason for what’s below:
A graph of the distribution of these preseason to postseason differences is not something to judge as having been good or bad, as much as it is a baseline for measuring improvement in the future. This the reason for looking at the the box and whisker plot of these 124 teams with their differences in T100 ranks at the end compared to where they started 16 weeks previous – See below:
The link to a Google Sheet which shows all the T100 ranks over the course of the whole season for every team can be found here. I took a thin cross-section of teams ending up 11th thru 13th this year in the T100 to demonstrate below. As you scan to the far left, you can see where each started, W0. What was a 3-13-26 “sandwich” became a 11-12-13 “sandwich” in week #16. Much thinner than what was thought at the beginning of the season for these 3 squads. Scanning left to right to see the ebb and flow of their rank changes, as it likely relates to a team’s wins and losses at various points of the year. The number on the far right is the net change in rating points from where the pre-season rating began. (There is a Google sheet with weekly ratings points too, but that would be overkill, even for me!)
I see light at the end of the tunnel, and like many of the players finishing their seasons, am looking forward to jumping into something new. When deciding to dive into this Frog-Jump role in 2024 I made the decision to test my limits and never ponder a question for which I wouldn’t commit to finding its answer, no matter what. I don’t just think about how many Cinco-Deuces may have occurred in the history of the tournament, I’ll spend an hour or two finding the answer. Thanks to Ramius for the outlet to express my viewpoint for all things D3 Volleyball, and then some. This will be my last T100 related post for the year.
(Though I still have my third and final installment of Serving Considerations coming later this week – “Should I spin or should I float?”- For those of you that like The Clash, I have a song just for you written to the melody of “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” all ready to go!)
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