National Review (10/14/21)

Another installment of the National Review where we offer different outlooks on teams nationally. We have the Quality Win Index (QWI), Points/Set and Hitting Percentage. I’ve also included Ned’s attempt at determining the selection criterion SOS. Again, the point of this is to show different viewports on the teams that are considered a national power this season.

Let’s start with my contribution where I look at select top teams and assign points based on where they are in Points/Set and Hitting Percentage. Remember, the lower the “Total” number is, the better they did in this exercise.

Here are the standings:

I removed two teams (Millikin and Carthage) just because I was being lazy and they were at the bottom.

Only two teams now at the elite 18+ Points/Set mark and that’s CMS and Otterbein and CMS is at an unheard-of number of 19! Two teams are still hitting above 0.300 in CMS and Calvin. Since CMS is doing well in both categories, it’s no surprise they are the top team in these “standings”. Calvin jumps 2 spots to 2^nd and Johns Hopkins also does their 2-spot jump to 3^rd. Trinity dropped 2 spots and now sits 4^th. Jumping twice seems to be a pattern as UC Santa Cruz does the same going from 7^th to 5^th to round out our Top 5.

Middlebury becomes the highest team on this list that is not ranked in either the AVCA or D3VbWest Top 25. I moved them out due to a loss this past weekend. Wartburg continues to struggle with offensive efficiency when compared to the other national powers but they are a Top 5 team in both the AVCA and D3VbWest rankings. Chicago is in both rankings (although they just lost to Carthage this week) but are last in these standings.

AVCA ranked teams outside of the Top 25 here are UW-Stevens Point, Gustavus Adolphus, Emory and Chicago.  

As a reminder, the above standings show how these teams are performing offensively without regard to who they played. QWI attempts to show us how teams are performing accounting for who they played. I will also list the SOS numbers at the bottom of this article.

For those that don’t remember the QWI article from August (or previous years), it takes each team’s schedule into consideration and determines where each opponent is ranked in various ranking services. It then gives points for beating quality teams while giving no points for beating teams that are of lesser quality (trying to be politically correct here). Quality is defined by the ranking services.

This week I have listed the Top 30 teams in QWI:

“Region” is the region each team plays in. “AVCA” is where they are ranked. (Note – This list was pulled prior to the new rankings from Tuesday.) A “V#” means they are receiving votes and the number in parenthesis means where they would have finished outside the Top 25. The “Current QWI” is their QWI number through yesterday.

The QWI list is dominated by Regions VII to X with only 3 spots out of the 30 going to the first 6 regions (2 to V and 1 to IV). This simply means these four regions are playing more national ranked teams and having success. I should point out that this probably means the ranking services that QWI uses do not favor the schools in Regions I through VI (for the most part), but it also means that these schools didn’t leave their area to find better schools to play. Definitely a catch-22.  

With QWI you are being rewarded with wins over opponents that are ranked highly between the rankings services the tool uses. There is no thought to how you did it or how efficient you were. You just needed to win. No surprise, therefore that the first 9 schools are all teams that are in or have been in the AVCA Top 10. Gustavus Adolphus is that 10^th team and you can see why they were added to the AVCA Top 25 rankings. They have produced quality results. Muskingum is the first school to appear that is not in either the AVCA or D3VbWest rankings. Other schools that appear in this list but not in the rankings are IWU, Augsburg, Millikin, Mount St. Joseph, Oshkosh, Wheaton, Denison and Concordia (WI).

For those Region X fans, our ordering was Trinity, CMS, Southwestern, Colorado College, Whitworth, Pomona-Pitzer and Chapman.  

Teams in my Watch List, not mentioned above, were Austin College (1.20) and Mary Hardin-Baylor (5.20). Again, this is a reflection on their schedules played and who they have beaten.

A new viewpoint added this week is the selection criterion SOS. Same 32 teams I have in my Points/Set + Hitting Percentage list:

Now we look at how hard of a schedule each team has played as judged by how the NCAA will judge the teams come selection day. Huge SOS numbers for the first 4 teams and you can bet that if they end up with decent winning records that they will also have an advantage in Ranked Results (another selection criterion). One interesting note is that there were 32 teams that had an SOS at 0.600 or above but only 7 are represented in this list. That means, come regional rankings day, there could be some surprise teams making the lists. Once we get below 0.570, I get a little nervous when it comes to selection. Again, the picture becomes clearer once the first regional rankings get published. Ranked teams like Colorado College, Northwestern, UC Santa Cruz, Southwestern and Mary Hardin-Baylor could all be at risk come selection day with those SOS numbers. Four of those teams are from Region X and you can see why I say that SOS is unfairly biased against teams/regions that exist on an island (i.e., regions that require flights to play both inside and outside the region).

We will finish with what’s important. Only a Top 11 team nationally can win the national championship based on historic data, so here you go:

UC Santa Cruz still does well in hitting percentage and we see that RIT (17-2) has jumped into the mix along with Williams (11-1). Hope drops out so their national championship hopes (no pun intended) are gone.