Don’t forget the “Tuesdays with MORE” title pays homage to the book, “Tuesdays with Morrie“ written by Mitch Album in 1997. It can also be taken literally to mean it comes out on Tuesday after the AVCA publishes the coach’s poll, being nothing more than a composite of the Median Order Ranks by Experts who regularly publish their rankings of Men’s D3 Volleyball in the public domain. I recommend you give both a read!
I’ve put in a new wrinkle below to demonstrate the 5 teams in line to be awarded at-large bids, if the NPI were to agree with the “MORE” order. This is based on an assumption the top ranked teams from conferences represented in the Top 10 win their end of season tournaments. The expected value of 2.05 seen below means probability theory now forecasts 2 of them will and 2 won’t. i.e. The extra 0.05 is due to probability treating a discrete event as continuous. For any team which doesn’t win their conference tournament and is ranked better than the lowest of those highlighted in green, they would be in line for an at-large bid, having missed out on the auto-bid. For example, if Loras (or any other CCIW team) were to defeat Carthage in a CCIW final, then Carthage would then replace St. John Fisher to be in line for the last at-large bid, making it a rank of 8th rather than 9th. Of course, when the time comes for the NPI to be public, the green highlighted teams will be indicated only using its NPI rank.
When a team is not recognized as among the best 25 by any expert it is awarded a generic 26th rank, a placeholder. In some cases, it might be legitimately 26th, but more often than not it would be in the interval closest to it. i.e. [27th, 35th]. Inside Hitter is still using its mid-January PSRs, so expect it to be a little off the beaten path until they engage their algorithm. When they do, the MORE becomes better, but in the meantime since Medians are used as the basis for this composite, there is little worry for skewed results, other than in a tiebreaker (MEAN) event. Another consideration is the highly variable number of matches played influencing rankings early. For example, Southern Virginia moving to 5th on Massey is almost certainly a function of not having played yet. The T100 employed a minor modification this year to be less responsive to any disproportionate number of matches played in a week, mostly because it saw Cal-Lu’s rank later in the ’24 season artificially drop 5 spots going long periods of time with no matches. This while teams within their metric’s neighborhood gained by having defeated some lesser opponents, thereby creating a false illusion their strength had overtaken Cal-Lu’s. Something many of us, including those who seeded the tournament last year, became well aware of as they went on a tear to the National Championship!
When Lindsay wrote, “Five setters, reverse sweeps and competitive volleyball on opening weekend” in Pond Talk-Week #2, her observations were spot on! The Venn Diagrams shown below support her take as Cinco Sets are up this year compared to the last two seasons, now at 17.4% up from their previous two-year average of 13.5%. The general theme of competitive volleyball she mentions is further enhanced by sweeps moving significantly down to 53% from its two-year average of 63.5%. Having witnessed some pretty crazy tournament outcomes, last year being all about the Cinco Set Deuce (C-D), I was compelled to track these as a subset of all Cinco Set matches, too. For example, 7 of the 14 bracket games leading to the final match in 2024 were Cinco- Set Deuces, a single outcome less likely than OT in an NFL game. When was the last time the NFL playoffs had half its games go to OT? Never even close! And after I wrote “Manhattan Mania” almost a year ago, I was especially interested in “Five Deuces Across the Board” (5-Ds), the insanely razor-thin competitive environment where not just the last set is a 2-pointer, but all 5 go that route. I went back 10 years of NCAA MVB across all divisions, looking at nearly 17,000 match scores to see there have been only seven 5-Ds, with none of the other 6 having more than 2 of the five sets go extra points. Baruch & NYU last year had all but the 2nd set go beyond the threshold of 25/15. Maybe a good idea to refresh that post from last year because this Friday, the day before its one-year anniversary, I intend to share a mind-blowing back story related to it.
Harvey observed that team depth is far more critical now than ever before and he was also right on the mark. Is it because there is so much more team depth across the landscape, making it naturally more likely to meet 3 or 4 good opponents on a long weekend who pose the real threat of defeat? Perhaps. Might it also be a function of being the first year of NPI with an uncertainty for how its SOS will provide leverage which motivated more teams to schedule a stronger non-conference? I took note of no less than 10 teams for which that answer seems to be, “Maybe so.” However, the reasons matter little because the by-product is we all get more exciting volleyball to watch and/or play.
Earlier in the week I mentioned a possibility for the MCVL placing a team or two on the bubble this year. Something rarely ever written or spoken out loud! There are at least 3 more from the Midwest with that potential as compared to year’s past, and another 4 from the East also not typically thought of as capable to press closer to the Top 10. Put those together with the usual suspects and you have potential for a bubble to go from its normal half dozen candidates to twice that amount, instead. Based on this, it sure seems like a year I wouldn’t have minded having a little human oversight for a first-year model (NPI) probably no more precise than those we have had in place for years – Just a thought from someone who has spent more time creating & assessing the quality of sports valuation models and how best to calibrate them when they are flawed. Though I do suspect that if there were so many teams close to each other on the bubble, a model that picks ANY 2 or 3 of them over the others in no way could be said to have failed. There I go sounding like some former students who too often would go into a test to proclaim, “I just don’t want to fail” as if it were in some way equivalent to succeeding.