NPI Rankings (9/8/25)

A late start to the day. Well, it wasn’t a late start but it was for my volleyball duties.

I have updated the 2025 NPI Rankings page with the NCAA Power Index (NPI) Rankings through yesterday’s matches. You’ll notice that we have brought back the Pool Column. This column shows you which teams would get the theoretical conference Pool A bid (Automatic Qualifier) by winning their conference tournament. We assign the ‘A’ based on the highest NPI for each conference. The remaining teams are eligible for an at-large bid (Pool C). Again, we assign those top down until we run out of spots.

For this week, Montclair State is the last at-large team in, which makes the cut-line 55.58. We expect the cut-line to raise to that 60 NPI range (plus or minus a point) once more matches are played. The table also include the previous week’s rankings. Lots of movement this week as should have been expected. This will start to become more static as we get further down the schedule.

Kind of impressive that Otterbein has retained the number one spot for two weeks. They are the 2025 version of Juniata, I guess. (Although, even Juniata wasn’t our leader Week 1 last season). Speaking of Juniata, they jump up to number 2 with UW-Oshkosh right behind them. The Wellesley ranking is dumb right now because they just have one match. You can see with their oNPI that they played a team with an NPI of 49.17. Since they beat them, they get about a 10 point bump, which puts them in the 59 range. A lot of teams are hurt right now because they’ve played opponents that have poor NPI numbers and they must count them in their average. Remember, that with NPI, each team must count at least 10 matches. Once they reach 10 matches played, they can start discarding “bad” wins. Bad wins are wins that netted a team a game NPI point total lower than their overall NPI. A perfect example of this is UW-Oshkosh. They sit third but they are counting a win over Marian who have an NPI of 42.43, which netted them a game NPI of only 53.9. Once they play enough matches, this will come off the books and you’ll see the UWO NPI jump up. (Reminder – Game NPI numbers for losses never come off the books.)

For the most part, we have some big names at the top of our rankings. Marywood is an outlier through the Top 15 or so. Let’s see if they can hold on to that spot as they play more.

There were only 21 teams that had a Quality Win Bonus (QWB), which is given for wins over teams that have an NPI of 55.5 or higher. UW-Oshkosh had 3 while Juniata had 2 of these. Everyone else had one.

I need to finish up my Top 25 so I’ll cut this short. Enjoy!