Fun With Numbers (Wk3)

I’m going to do another little Fun with Numbers article but it will be a quick one. I think I covered the NPI stuff on Monday pretty good so no use diving into that again. I did update the NPI Rankings through yesterday so you can always check that out.

Okay, maybe a little NPI talk. Interesting that Oshkosh has jumped both undefeated IWU and undefeated La Verne who gave them their only loss. Remember that NPI doesn’t care about head-to-head. Because Oshkosh’s schedule is so difficult, they will be rewarded as long as they win most of their matches. I switched over from oNPI to uoNPI this update. Oshkosh is at 54.804, which is impressive. That’s the average NPI of their opponents whose game NPI numbers they are using in their own NPI. It throws away all of the bad wins and gives you a better idea (I think) of the quality of teams that really count. You can basically go down the table looking for teams with a uoNPI of 53 or higher and you’ll see that the team has more losses than the teams around it that don’t have a uoNPI of 53. Oh, North Park becomes our last at-large team in this update. The cut-line DROPS to 55.617 from the update from Sunday. It’s still early, but I still see a lot of teams with a uoNPI of less than 50 above the cut-line. Not a great sign.

Let’s move on to Hitting Percentage and, all together, all of the national champions since I’ve tracked this number have finished in the Top 11 of this statistic. Nothing else compares to that.

Since teams 11 through 13 are very close, I give you the Top 13. Three NESCAC teams still in the mix this week. Teams that look out of place are Hardin-Simmons, Whittier and Maryville. All good teams but you wouldn’t think about them necessarily when talking about Hitting Percentage. Remember, your national champion is somewhere in that table!

Switching over to Points/Set and the national average is 14.22. 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:

We have 33 teams that are at 17 Points/Set or higher. Every team in the 18s I have ranked except for William Smith who I had in my preseason rankings. It’s always a good idea to compare the Points/Set against the team’s Strength of Schedule since some of these teams might be doing this against weaker opponents.

I’m skipping Reception Errors this week. I will say the national average is 11.5% so a small uptick since last week when it was 11.44%. La Verne still leads at 5.5%, which is up from 4.0% last week. They played in that tough Oshkosh tournament so not surprising. Teams in that 5% range are La Verne, Trinity, Wesleyan and Rose-Hulman.

Sorry this is so quick with not much depth. On vacation and it rained a bit so I thought I’d take a look at this again this week.

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