I was planning to not post anything before the Sunday 2:00 pm championship match I believed was today. Checked in to see where it stood and found out it’s now scheduled for Monday at 7:00 pm. My first thought was that ESPN came along in the 11th hour to make an offer conditional to the match being on Monday that the NCAA couldn’t refuse. I was very concerned they would bring in their own people for the broadcast and had a moment of great sorrow that I would not be able to hear the color of Coach Wingert on the call. Truly, … OK, maybe not great sorrow, but sorrow, nonetheless. I look forward to the “The Reignman” and his unique brand of color about 24 hours from now, having found out from he and his friends the pushback was due to a religious exemption the NCAA offers. I suppose it would have to be either the Almighty Entertainment & Sports Programming Network or the Almighty, themself, with the sway to get that done! Perhaps the most important ramification of this development is y’all get to see the final numerical breakdown for what promises to be a greatly entertaining final match tomorrow evening.
With the semis now in the books, and I assume the Cal-Lu Kingsmen probably landing right about now at LAX from what has been the equivalent of flights halfway around the world in the last 10 days, the new T100 has been updated with its top 5 teams shown below. The last match of the year is between two teams exactly 0.69 points apart according to the T100 metrics. This forecasts a 60%-win probability for the Knights using the logistic formula seen below the table.
Even though that formula above with T100 metrics targeted the eventual winner in 8 out of every 9 matches played across the whole 2025 season, it might seem a little too strong in favor of Southern Virginia, a team in its last two matches playing #6 Juniata & #9 Messiah having generated 93 Kills with 47 errors in 245 attempts for a 0.188 efficiency in hitting. Especially since the Pride are the only team to defeat the Knights in the last calendar year. So, I decided to take a closer look to see what I could find out about that dichotomy.
Springfield has played 17 matches this year against Top 40 opponents whose average rank was 15th. Southern Virginia has played against 20 in the Top 40 with an average rank of 21st. The graphs below plot both theirs and their opponent hitting efficiencies for these Top 40 teams they’ve played and then produces lines of best fit whose slopes indicate the responsive nature of each team to the level of resistance offered. The least responsive lines by far are Springfield’s offensive prowess and Southern Virginia’s defensive genius. These are the lines whose slopes are nearest 0, closer to being horizontal. Springfield’s defense gives way to better offenses more than Coach Sullivan would like and Southern Virginia’s Offense seems to be thwarted by better team’s defensive ability more than Coach Peterson would prefer, I’d imagine. The point being everything about this match screams it is going to be the answer to the age-old question, “Does Offense or Defense win Championships?”
I decided to focus a little bit on the recent matches these teams have played in the NCAAs to this point. It shouldn’t be too difficult to accept some recency bias from a sport with a majority of its stats from a single match regularly having too small sample sizes to generate the confidence it seems to provide for coaches and the like! LOL The green arrows shown on the graphs above give the recent subplot of the story of hitting rates the last 10 days. You can see they are not only longer on Springfield’s side, but they are also seen farther left implying their better deltas were performed against stronger resistances, too. On the whole, however, the year-long trend also supports the Knights as a slight favorite, just a little less so, coming to the conclusion for 56% rather than a 60% chance for it to win the match. The table above with black cells indicates each possible match score’s chances to happen, and informs a Cinco is 50% more likely to happen than a sweep. i.e. 38% is half again as much more than 25%.
The tables directly above drive the actual data points graphed earlier above that. One advantage of the tables being you can see the common opponents and the match kill rates for when these teams played each other earlier in the year. The common opponents like most of the data above, other than the recent, suggest a minor advantage to the Southern Virginia Knights. In their 3-1 loss to Springfield on March 29th, they did have a smidge better kill rate and outscored the Pride even though they lost 3-1 that day. This is pretty rare because in well less than 5% of matches will the team having been defeated outhit and outscore the winner, but the vast majority of those almost always go to a 5th set, not just the 4 sets there were on that day. The other thing to note is the last time they played it was at Springfield’s Blake Arena. And with another night that I suspect the Knights could have slept in their own rack compared to the Pride stuck in their hotel, the odds are a little stacked against Springfield. Just the way they have liked it every step of this tournament so far!
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