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D3VbWest Top 25
Here are my rankings for the first week of the season. I will also have a West Region Top 8 and (new this year) a West Region Points/Set standings. That’s right three articles wrapped into one and the best part is the price is the same! You’ll notice in the Top 25 that I list “key results” from last week and this simply means a win against a team that was in the Top 25 the previous week or is in the Top 25 or one that I’m considering for the Top 25. All losses are “key results” for obvious reasons. (For my Trinity readers, this is obvious because every loss is important while not every win is. A loss creates a negative impression regardless of the opponent’s ability to the voters while a win may not if it was over a poor opponent.)
For those looking for more insight into my ranking process, catch my podcast that pseudo dropped last night and then for real this morning. Oh, and get help. Here are my rankings with additional thoughts below.
My rank, (my preseason rank, AVCA rank), record, key results last week1 (6, 6) Johns Hopkins 3-0; W: Juniata, Ithaca. 2 (5, 1) Trinity 4-0; W: Whitworth. 3 (1, 5) Carthage 5-0; W: Loras. 4 (4, 7) Hope 3-0; W: St. Olaf, Aurora, Saint Benedict. 5 (NR, NR) UW-Eau Claire 5-0; W: Northwestern, UT-Dallas, WashU. 6 (7, 2) Colorado College 4-0; W: None. 7 (13, 14) Ohio Northern 4-0; W: Mount St. Joseph, Wittenberg. 8 (8, 4) Emory 5-0; W: None. 9 (9, 10) Claremont-M-S; W: UW-Oshkosh. 10 (3, 8) Berry 2-0; W: None. 11 (2, 2) Calvin 5-1; W: Otterbein; L: Augsburg. 12 (NR, NR) UW-Whitewater 2-0; W: Chicago. 13 (NR, 9) Chicago 2-1; W: Saint Benedict, St. Olaf; L: UW-Whitewater. 14 (NR, 11) Transylvania 4-0; W: None. 15 (12, 15) Mary Hardin-Baylor 5-0; W: BSC. 16 (14, 12) Juniata 2-1; W: Ithaca; L: Johns Hopkins. 17 (NR, 20) Northwestern 4-1; W: Bethel; L: UW- Eau Claire. 18 (NR, NR) Mount St. Joseph 4-1; W: Muskingum, Denison, Wittenberg; L: Ohio Northern. 19 (NR, 17) Millikin 4-0; W: None. 20 (NR, NR) Augsburg 3-1; W: Calvin; L: Otterbein. 21 (NR, NR) Virginia Wesleyan 5-0; W: Chris Newport. 22 (16, NR) Babson 4-0; W: Johnson & Wales. 23 (NR, NR) Bethel 4-1; W: None; L: Northwestern. 24 (25, NR) Whitworth 3-1; W: None; L: Trinity. 25 (NR, NR) Centre 4-0; W: UT-Dallas. Dropped Out: UT-Dallas (10), Otterbein (11), St. Olaf (15), UW-Oshkosh (17), WashU (18), Chapman (19), Muskingum (20), Saint Benedict (21), Bowdoin (22), Ithaca (23) and Your Team (24 – Sorry).
For those that read my preseason Top 25, you know that I was only half serious with it because there was just no way to know how good (or bad) these teams would be with some of them not having played for almost 2-years. Regardless, I’m not ashamed of how many teams dropped from my original rankings because we need to look at the field fresh every week.
Going through the rankings as quick as I can, here are some notes. Nice opening week for Johns Hopkins and being the defending national champions has to count for something. I mean the king is the king until they die, right? I still love Trinity and I think they deserve the second spot. I had Carthage as my top team and we’re splitting hairs here but I’ve moved them to 3 probably for no other reason than I saw Trinity play and didn’t see Carthage play. Impressive opening week for Hope gets them the 4th spot. Same goes for Eau Claire. It was hard for me to figure out the WIAC because they didn’t play in the spring. I used Oshkosh as a placeholder because you knew at least one team would step up if not two. Pseudo defending champion Colorado College slots into the 6th spot simply because I’d like to see them play better competition. I liked Ohio Northern before the season and they did nothing to prove me wrong. The 8th spot for Emory (and the 10th for CMS) is not a slight, but like Colorado College just need to see them play better competition, which happens this weekend. The first team with a loss falls to 11th in Calvin. If the voters want to move them lower then no issues but they won’t. The second WIAC team to step up is Whitewater with their win over Chicago. Their match was really close so I have these two teams back-to-back. Not sure how I skipped over Transy in my preseason Top 25 but that was a mistake.
As for the rest, it’s a mix of teams with no losses and a single loss. Northwestern was another team I glossed over in my rankings for some reason. Kudos to Mount St. Joseph for a good opening week and I thought they needed to be rewarded. The Calvin, Augsburg and Otterbein threesome was tough to figure out as they each have a win and a loss against each other. Otterbein was the odd team out unfortunately. More rewards for Virginia Wesleyan for a good opening weekend. I decided to punish some teams that didn’t play, which is why we don’t see Bowdoin, Tufts and Chapman. They each have plenty of time to get back on the rankings. On the flip side, Babson did play so on they go. I liked Whitworth to start the year and they showed a lot against Trinity so they stay. Centre gets the final spot after a good opening weekend. The hard part is really staying on but congratulations for the 25th spot.
My process was to combine the AVCA rankings with mine and then look at the teams that stepped up this week. I also tried to look at additional teams that are probably flying under the radar. Still, I’m sure I missed some teams during my process. Teams I’d have no issues seeing on the AVCA rankings that aren’t listed here are IWU, Wartburg, Eastern, Mount Union, Southwestern and Averett. I expect we’ll also hear from the teams that didn’t play week one that have some promise. (It hurt me to leave off Chapman.)
As a reminder, Ricky Nelson does a Top 10 each week, which you can find at his site. Our Top 10 differs in order slightly and he has Whitewater and Transylvania making the list while I have Carthage and Berry. Otherwise, same teams.
For the West Region readers, I will now go through our teams. In the future, once I get my Watch List up-and-running, I’ll use the NCAA selection criteria to put this together. That’s when things get strange.
Region X Rankings (9/6/21) – (previous rank)
Trinity (1)
Colorado College (2)
Chapman (4)
CMS (6)
Whitworth (8)
Mary Hardin-Baylor (5)
Southwestern (NR)
UC Santa Cruz (NR)
Dropped Out: UT-Dallas (3) and Cal Lutheran (7)
Briefly, Trinity and Colorado College are obvious. You may wonder why I have CMS high in my Top 25 but lower than Chapman here who wasn’t in at all. Well, I feel like there are different viewpoints being served. The Top 25 needs to have uniformed rules that fit the country. This ranking is more on feel and eyeballs until I use the selection criteria. I think Chapman has a real chance to be better than CMS. That could all come crashing down this week if they get healthy enough to play but for this week that’s how I feel. I liked how CMS and Whitworth looked so they get a bump. No issues with Mary Hardin-Baylor but I just liked the competition more with the other two teams. I almost left UT-Dallas in the rankings and you’ll see why in the Points/Set but I just can’t get past that Centre loss. Southwestern did enough to make the list and I liked UC Santa Cruz and how they played (eyeball and Points/Set). If you don’t like my list, there is a complaint form below.
The final part of this article will focus on Points/Set (P/S). This is a statistic that I looked at in the spring and really liked. It sort of had the ability to contextualize wins and losses. Points are the points “earned” by a team in a match. You get them with kills, service aces and team blocks. You don’t get them when the other team has an error like hitting out or a ball handling mistake or making a service error. I most likely will separate this out into another article as we get more matches under our belt but I wanted to (re)introduce this here. Here are the complete standings based on Points/Set excluding the teams that have yet to play (we are still missing two box scores so one less match for Belhaven, Mary Hardin-Baylor and George Fox):
First thing is to explain what this means (or what I think it means). The higher the number, the better the team is at creating its own offense. I’ve done articles in the past that show that every national champion has been in the Top 11 (thanks Emory) in hitting percentage. (I can’t remember how far back that goes but it was as far back as the statistics kept allowed me). That’s a measure of offensive efficiency while this is a measure of overall offense. Looking at teams that made the NCAA Tournament for the previous 5-years, I saw that you really needed to be 16 P/S or higher to have any kind of shot. If you could hit the 17 P/S mark then things looked really good. Very few teams reach the 18 P/S mark for a season but these are your elite teams. Remember that teams can be hurt in this statistic by no fault of their own. One is playing a lot of 5-set matches where the fifth set only goes to 15. The other is playing a team that makes a lot of unforced errors. When a team gifts you a match, it will hurt your P/S because you didn’t have a chance to earn your own points. Saying this, I’ve haven’t really found this to be the case unless really bad teams are played. DIII teams in our region, no matter their standing, are typically good enough to put up a fight in all matches.
These numbers are going to change a lot so I don’t want to go into great detail on them today. Here are some observations as we skim the list:
CMS backed up their opening weekend with an impressive number. It doesn’t appear their play will be a fluke.
No surprise to see CC and Trinity in the Top 3.
What should be a surprise is to see UC Santa Cruz sitting at 4. Can’t sleep on the Banana Slugs!
Austin College really rolled through their opening weekend and this P/S number reflects that fact.
George Fox got a little lucky, which I’ll show below, but still a fine number.
UT-Dallas, despite their losses, didn’t play that poorly according to this statistic. Something to grab on to for Comet fans.
The Top 10 in this all finished at 16 P/S or higher so a good start.
Whitworth and UMHB finishing just outside the 16 P/S number is interesting. Small sample size is my thought at this moment.
Cal Lutheran at 14 P/S is a bit concerning.
Concordia 0-5 start is backed up by their 13.18 number.
Finally, I tracked the in-region matches just to see how teams compared. Here were the teams that lost despite doing better in this statistic:
Centenary lost to LeTourneau in 4-sets but led P/S 15.75 to 12.75. Quite a shocking difference to be honest and still lose. Centenary had double the attack errors (29-14) so LETU playing an error free match won it for them.
La Verne lost to George Fox in 3-sets but led P/S 16 to 15.67. You’ll see this at times as it’s pretty close. Again, attack errors were the problem as ULV had 22 to GFU’s 9.
Puget Sound lost to St. Thomas in 4-sets but led P/S 15.25 to 14.5. 14 blocks by St. Thomas helped and they were +13 in attack errors.
Pomona-Pitzer lost to George Fox in 4-sets but led P/S 18.5 to 18. High offense match in this one!
Puget Sound lost to Southwestern in 4-sets but led P/S 15.25 to 14.25.
Looking at the matches like this shows how Puget Sound wasn’t that far off from winning two more matches while GFU was (maybe) fortunate in two they played.
I tracked “records” in this statistic in the spring but I think I’ll pass on that this season. However, here were the teams that hit 20 P/S or more:
UC Santa Cruz (20.33) against Whittier
CMS (20.5) against UC Santa Cruz
Trinity (21.3) against Hendrix
Dallas (20.67) against Sul Ross State
UT-Dallas (22.5) against Webster
On the flip side, we saw Centenary hit 5.67 P/S against Ozarks and Mid-America. Remember that Centenary split their team in two this past weekend. Overall (both squads), went for 12.46 P/S so kind of impressive they were able to absorb these two matches.
Lots of information to take in on a holiday Monday. We’ll see how the AVCA responds tomorrow and maybe I’ll find time to get my Watch List together. Have a great Labor Day!
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