Fun With Numbers (Wk2)

I thought it might be interesting to take a look back at the NCAA Power Index (NPI) numbers from this time last season. We were still trying to figure out some issues and the data that we produced wasn’t as comprehensive as we (uh, the Latvians) are doing now. Oh, if you hadn’t noticed, I have updated the NPI Rankings through yesterday’s matches. I guess what I’m saying is that this look back wouldn’t be a very long article so I’m also going to revisit what I did last week and take a look at the current Points/Set and Hitting Percentage numbers. We’ll start with NPI.

Looking at the 2024 Top 10 from our 9/12/24 file, we see the following teams:

Only two of those teams (Juniata and MIT) are in the current Top 10. Teams struggling right now (under the Top 100) from this list are Gettysburg, Millikin and CWRU. That top NPI number is over 1 point higher than Otterbein’s number today (62.960). As we know, Juniata just kept winning playing a tough schedule and probably created an NPI that will not be beaten in a very long time. All of these Top 10 teams are above 60 and, in fact, there were three other teams above that number last year. This year, we only have five teams above that number. Why? No clue. Could it be related to teams changing their approach to scheduling? Possibly. It may just be more of a random event more than anything.

I don’t think we had the concept of the cut-line at this time last season. We only added the predictions of the bids a little later. With the latest update, Messiah is the last at-large team in at an NPI of 55.76. They are the 47^th team to make the tournament. (Remember, we assign the automatic qualifier to the highest NPI team in each conference and they do not need at-large bids.) The 47^th team last season was Ohio Northern who sat at 56.00. So, although not exact in what I’m doing, the cut-line seems to be a tad lower this season (along with the NPI numbers in general).

Let’s move on to Hitting Percentage. You’ll hear this a lot from me, but since I’ve tracked this statistics, the national champion in DIII has always been in the Top 11. Here is your current Top 11:

We still have a strong New England representation in this category. In fact, the only non-NE teams are JHU, ETBU, Juniata and Chatham. There always seems to be a NE team or two in the final Top 11 that doesn’t look like they belong so not terribly surprising. The main reason for this is that this area of the country (as a whole) contains a lot of teams and a number can be quite bad. Still, a number of these NE teams will probably stay here for the entire season and their schedules will get slightly tougher. I do believe if Oshkosh ever wins the national championship, they will destroy my Top 11 theory. They just play too many difficult teams during the season. The average Hitting Percentage right now is 0.154 for those tracking it at home.

Switching over to Points/Set and the national average is 14.24. As a reminder, elite teams are typically above 18 and really good teams are in the 17s. Teams in this range are usually your at-large teams. Teams in the 16s are good and, in the past, have received an at-large but it gets really dicey. Here are your Top 10 leaders in Points/Set:

Bates is the only other team at 18 Points/Set. There are currently 29 teams in the 17 to 17.99 range in Points/Set. Those are some power programs at the top of this list and Points/Set is really something I monitor all year as an indication of a power team.

As a bonus, we looked at Reception Errors last week so let’s take a quick look again at this number. This is simply Return Errors divided by Return Attempts. There is no official stat kept on the grades of the reception attempt. Last week, we saw that the average Reception Error Percentage was 11.61% and this week it has fallen to 11.44%. Here are the 10 best teams in this category:

Sorry for not converting the decimal to percentage for you. La Verne continues to impress here with only a 3.99% error rate.

I do like to put out at least one extra article a week and I do like to have fun with numbers so two checkboxes marked. If you’d like to see these numbers for a specific school, I will leave that to you. I do have a link to the “NCAA Statistics” on the left side menu (or pulldown). From there you need to specify “Women’s Volleyball” and select “DIII”. From the next screen, simply select “Trends” and you are there. You can see these numbers on a conference basis or a team basis.

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