Though the coaches believe the Violets have done enough to take over the #1 ranking in the land, the computers have not arrived there. I think they blinked first regarding schedule strength. The MORE dropped Hobart out of the Top 10 this week, something the coach’s consensus is not on board with just yet, and the only two experts not agreeing with its composite Top 10 are Massey who has Springfield at #11 and the AVCA with Loras sitting at #12. Plenty of “Bubbleicious” content from Sunday’s “The Fixings” if you are looking for some more of that.
Updating the distribution of match scores this year on the Venn Diagram is offered below. I decided to put in subsets for 3D & 4D matches which are certainly not as rare as the 5D once every other season or so, but they are infrequent as there has been just 1 of each the first month of the season. The MIT v. Messiah match had me thinking we might see a 5D, but Messiah took the 4th by 2 and kept the match from having a chance to join the rarified air of NYU at Baruch a little over a year ago. (Though how could it? Neither was a dog the likes of Baruch last year!) Oh, and it prevented MIT from having a chance to come back and win, of course. It was one of many “nail-biters” this past weekend. We can only hope for more of the same this week!
I just re-read the last paragraph about how with over 140 matches last week there were only 4 Cinco-Deuces. This, while in a week’s time in last year’s NCAA Tournament we got 3 more than that in 8 games. (All but one was won by the seeded dog, too.) Not to say the margins of the highest profile games weren’t close the last few days, they were! This game we love continues to show its linchpin moments. Sometimes less than a minute of real time where one team’s prospects can go from being a 3-1 Favorite to a 3-1 Dog. That happens in the NFL, certainly. However, theirs is a game where more than 10% of all points in a contest are regularly scored in an instant, while ours is one where each score is almost always less than a single percent of the total. Makes it more remarkable the leverage just a couple of points can make. Potentially the same as if the Eagles defense gets a pick-6 off Mahomes when KC is in the red zone. (You heard it here first!) I once watched a 1-point set deficit late in a 3rd, and all knotted up at 1-1, take a team from only 25%-match-win probability to near 80% in just 44 seconds – A single point at a time! There is something to be said about playing the waning moments of a volleyball set with the kind of pace the 2-minute offense does on the gridiron – Preparation turning into routine muscle memory, accelerating the action to make the defense not know what hit them. I keep waffling between MVB and Football now that Super Bowl week has arrived. I am ready to see the Chefs go hungry for a change.