All about “Ned” & Stuff

Our friend “Ned” has been doing some work looking at the NCAA Power Index (NPI) from last season and back through the simulations that the NCAA provided and that we were able to duplicate. One of the interesting parts of his work was identifying the at-large cut-line. We know that last year, Centre received the last at-large bid so their NPI was the cut-line at 59.621. Looking back through the simulations, “Ned” found that the previous cut-lines were:

In my articles, I often assume a cut-line of 60 NPI. This was based off my fuzzy memory of the simulations and adding a bit of play to the number. Now that we see the actual numbers, we see that 60 may be a tad high but I’ll still say that it’s the number teams should be shooting for just in case we get a bump one year. You also have to remember that the difference between 60 NPI and 58.615 is often not even an additional loss. The number is just so close that it’s possible a team couldn’t mathematically finish between those two numbers given the schedule they play. (Latvians – Don’t check me on this. It sounded really good when I wrote it.)

Anyway, I got to thinking there is another problem with the cut-line moving forward and that is simply that no team in our history has ever scheduled with NPI in mind. In our 2025 Schedule Analysis, we see that some teams are still not scheduling to NPI but others are. Some teams are specifically scheduling to NPI. What will this mean to the cut-line in 2025 and beyond? Well, we probably don’t know for sure but my guess is that we should see it increase. As more teams tailor their schedule to NPI, the higher the overall number should go. Who loses out in this case? Most likely the teams on the edges. That would be your top teams that may find it more difficult to find opponents willing to play them and teams rebuilding with poor NPIs from the previous season that really have to scrounge for matches. If more teams schedule the teams from the middle, then it seems natural that the overall NPIs for those teams around that cut-line will be higher than what we’ve seen in the past. All that to say, we probably should still shoot for 60.

I will also say it’s interesting that the number of bids available doesn’t seem to really correlate to the cut-line. This is certainly a small sample size but if there had been only 19 bids instead of 21 last season, our cut-line would have been 59.788. Conversely, for the 2021 and 2022 seasons, if they had 21 bids like we’ve had the last two seasons, the cut-line would have been even lower. So, for the third time, shoot for 60 because dropping below that number just puts you in the hands of Athena (the Greek god of mathematics). (CMS should be fine with that, I guess.)

Speaking of the work “Ned” was doing, I finally got around to VolleyTalk where he likes to post and saw that he had a link to his NPI manifesto. It’s a good read.

Segueing on, one of the things mentioned in the VolleyTalk thread I linked to above was the DIII Women’s Volleyball Annual Report. I couldn’t remember if I covered this in the past but there is a note in there (Item 7) that mentions the idea of implementing a minimum Strength Of Schedule (SOS) for teams to receive an at-large bid. The belief from the committee is that this would encourage coaches to develop more challenging schedules. This is actually an idea that I’ve championed as a failsafe for those teams that produce an easy NPI schedule and then perform to it. What that SOS would look like would be interesting. Last season, there were two teams above the at-large cut-line that had “low” SOS numbers that made the field but both won their conference’s Automatic Qualifier (AQ). Those teams were Whitworth at 0.529 and Gallaudet at 0.538. The lowest SOS that received an at-large bid was Marietta at 0.571. It should be pointed out that if Gallaudet had lost their conference final, they would have dropped below the cut-line and not received an at-large bid. Whitworth, on the other hand, was safe and would have received an at-large bid even with a conference tournament loss. Finding an SOS number that doesn’t penalize remote conferences while also protecting the integrity of the at-large bid might be tricky but I think this would be a smart change by the committee. A simple starting point would be an SOS of 0.500. I think 0.510 would also be a really safe starting point, too.

Back to “Ned” and I do recommend reading his review of NPI. “Ned” is generally favorable of the formula and makes a lot of good points to this end. My one big criticism is that NPI is flawed to the point that low SOS teams can game the system and receive an at-large bid. Maybe a failsafe SOS is the answer. Maybe an adjustment to the Quality Win Bonus multiplier is the answer (discussed in “Ned’s” report). The answer is not to run NPI in its current state and hope my doomsday prophecy doesn’t happens but that is what will happen this season.

That’s my “Ned” content for the day. As always, thank you to him for all of the support he has provided the site.

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