AVCA Top 25 (Preseason)

The AVCA have released their preseason Top 25 Poll. There isn’t much change from the final 2021 poll so I figure a lot of voters just used that as a guide. In fairness, there isn’t much else a voter can do at this point. It’s not like we have a website dedicated to DIII volleyball that puts out articles on statistics loss or their own Top 25. Dark days indeed.

As a reminder, these are DIII coaches that vote for this. The number of voters often changes week-to-week but it looks like they are going with 90 members as they did last year. The AVCA will try to normalize the points so when less coaches vote in a week, the majority rules. In other words, if you were the top vote getter but 10 coaches went missing then you’ll be given the first place votes for those coaches, as well. (If you look at the link, you’ll notice that the “Total Points” column also includes the word “Adjusted”.) Points are awarded based on your position. First place gets 25 points, 2nd gets 24 on down to 25th, which gets 1 point. The list of voters with their votes will be published once the season starts. It can often be fun to see how certain coaches vote. You will see regional biases built into the voters at times. Conference biases also. Some coaches strictly go by record, which begs the question as to why they vote since records are a very public matter. Oh, well. So much time to get into all of that in the future. (The majority of this paragraph was taken from my article last year with permission by me, the author.)

Looking at the poll and the defending national champions, UW-Eau Claire, received 72 first place votes to finish on top to start the year. They are followed by my choice, CMS and then Calvin, Juniata and Trinity. These same five teams finished on top last year with the only change being a swap of CMS and Calvin. First place votes went to Eau Claire, CMS (11), Calvin (4), Trinity (1), Berry (1) and Emory (1).

The gap between Eau Claire and CMS, despite the big difference in first place votes, is actually only 40 points, which indicates Eau Claire has some coaches that don’t have them that high in their rankings. I could probably be counted in this group.

If I’m looking at the polls correctly, Transylvania is the only team to break into the Top 25 that weren’t there at the end of last year. Transy is a team that I think will be in the Top 10 this year. The only team to fall out of the Top 25 is Mary Hardin-Baylor who were 24 at the end of last year despite not qualifying for the NCAA Tournament. Loyal readers know I’m not happy with the Cru’s schedule this year so it will be difficult to really know how good they are this year.

Teams I have in my rankings that didn’t make the AVCA list are Wittenberg (8), Whitworth (9), UW-Oshkosh (11), Aurora (12), Stevenson (21) and Babson (22). We’ve got plenty of time to figure out the rankings and when we do, it will be the first time ever! Well, as we should know, these rankings don’t really mean anything when it comes to the NCAA Tournament and selection. We won’t see the real rankings until October so we have to enjoy these until then.

One thing that always interests me in this preseason poll is how many teams received only one vote and how many points they were awarded. This year there 13 teams that received one vote but those votes counted as 69 points! That’s over 5 points per vote, which means there are 13 coaches out there that were very sure of a team that no one else liked.

Looking at Region X, we had CMS (2), Trinity (5), Colorado College (14) and Southwestern (18) ranked. Teams receiving votes were Mary Hardin-Baylor, Whitworth (get on this train voters!), UC Santa Cruz (well, sort of as they are Region VI), Pacific Lutheran and UT-Dallas. The only team in my Region X rankings that didn’t make the AVCA poll was Pomona-Pitzer.

I got word that the SCAC volleyball preview will be out next Wednesday. I’ve been ghosted by the NWC but I figure we’ll get theirs next week, too.