NPI Webinar

I have been fighting a cold for the last week after a quick trip over to Ojai, California to visit family. I may have to mask up on flights just to avoid getting sick with anything in the future. I’m such a delicate little daisy in my later years, it appears. Cold ended up getting worse until medicine was finally prescribed and now, I’m finally on the upswing. Thank you for all of the cards and letters. Always appreciated.

We did have a volleyball NCAA Power Index (NPI) webinar today for coaches, administrators and vagabonds (I counted at least 2 others than just me). It was mainly presented by my best friend Sam Atkinson (Associate Athletic Director for Communications at Gallaudet University). Sam is also the Chair for the DIII Volleyball National Committee. Sam also likes to delete any emails I send him. Sam struggles with friendship.

There wasn’t a lot of new information shared but I thought I would pass along things I found interesting. There were about 60 people there for the presentation that lasted around 45 minutes. I saw a number of prominent coaches on the list of attendees so I am glad this is something that is important to them.

Sam went over the dials starting with the major one, “Winning % / Strength of Schedule (SOS)”. Nothing major here. They did have an example of SOS calculated which showed a team beating three schools with an NPI of 52, 58 and 70. This gave the winning school an “SOS” of 60 as you average those three numbers and divide by 3. So, again SOS is no longer strength of schedule as we knew it but an average of opponent’s NPI. The example is also kind of wrong because it didn’t address the dropping of NPIs that would lower your own number. Of course, it was a simple example and in that I was a little disappointed. I would have liked to see an explanation of how an NPI is created from a match. Maybe the belief was that this was too much to handle for the coaches. I know it blows my mind at times.

Sam mentioned that they decided to go with 55.5 NPI for Quality Win Bonus (QWB). They liked this number because it was basically the top 100 schools in DIII.

He talked about the Home/Away Bonus that they elected not to use. He said that there were over 5600 matches last year and they felt that the chance of error in recording that data was too great. I hadn’t really thought of that as an issue but I’m not familiar with the recording of game data and to whether the home/away information gets messed up.

He also talked about not doing the Overtime Bonus. In our case it would be matches that go to 5-sets. Sam explained that the consensus was they didn’t want to penalize a team that had an injury or were playing their 4^th match in 2-days. I thought it was odd he didn’t talk about the benefits to teams losing the 5-setter.

Minimum wins was also covered and that is just the number of countable wins needed for NPI. If a team wins less then those all will be counted. It’s quite possible a team with a good schedule has more than 10 countable wins. Remember that wins that don’t raise your NPI get dropped but you need 10 wins in the books before that is considered.

The big item of note from the webinar was the next statement where Sam said that all losses will count. Me and my Latvian brothers and sisters thought it was all losses EXCEPT those that increase a team’s NPI. It actually read that way in the slide but Sam later confirmed that all losses will count. This cleared up an issue we had with zero-win teams as to what their NPI would be. Some thought it would be 0. Since we know all losses will count, it will be an average of the NPI gained in those losses. Why does that matter? Well, you’ll be surprised how a zero-win team’s NPI will ripple through everyone else’s NPI. After all, a national schedule exists in a vacuum.

It was also mentioned that NPI would be used for bracketing come NCAA time. Regional matchups and the reduction of flights is still paramount but once the brackets are set, NPI will be used for seeding.

It sounded like the dials will be in place for 2 or 3 years. I heard both in the webinar. The exception would be if the sport makes a fundamental rule that impacts the dials. I don’t see that as being very likely.

It was mentioned that NPI won’t be published until mid to late October, which is a disappointment. Coaches can learn a lot in watching the changes to NPI based on the schedule. Don’t worry, D3VbWest should have at least 2 simulations going all year.

There was some discussion on the Regional Advisory Committees (RAC). They will be responsible for reviewing the data but I’m unsure how they will be able to do this without knowing the formula. This is basically a black box to them. In a nutshell, and this is just my opinion, the RACs have gone from being one of the most important committees in volleyball to one of the least important. Don’t @ me. They still will publish regional rankings at their normal times but it will just be a sorted list based on regions from the NPI master list.

Someone asked how the final at-large team is decided and the response was that they just count down the list until they get to the last team. It’s basically a cut line. No discussion or opinions needed. This is purely a numbers game.

I was disappointed not to see the 2023 numbers/teams produced by the official NPI formula. I really thought this would be part of the presentation but it was not. The presentation actually kind of ended quickly as I would have asked about this. Remember, from one of our simulations, we believe that UW-Platteville, Virginia Wesleyan, Mary Hardin-Baylor, Ohio Wesleyan and UW-River Falls would have gotten in instead of Stevenson, Middlebury, St Olaf, Williams and Tufts. I wonder what this group of coaches would have thought about that? The obvious difference is that three New England schools are removed. The less-obvious difference is that Mary Hardin-Baylor had a (real) SOS of 0.460 last year.

To close this out but to touch on my favorite region, New England, why did NPI hate them so much in 2023? I believe New England hate is really overdone and I always try to be the voice of reason when it comes to Region I and Region II. It’s too bad others can’t be more like me and now it appears their bias has infected a formula! Shame! Here’s the thing, NPI does help quality teams in poor conferences by not penalizing them for beating poor teams they are forced to face and that is something that was mentioned in the webinar. Who it doesn’t help are quality conferences with a bunch of good teams. Remember that Region I is basically the NESCAC and Region II is basically the NEWMAC. It’s very common for all of the teams in Region I and Region II to only come from these two conferences. That’s not a recipe for success with NPI. The reason is that the NPI hates losses so getting a lot of teams out of the same conference isn’t as likely as in the past. There are simply too many losses that have to happen. Middlebury and Tufts suffered 3 conference losses each. Williams had 5 and remember that each of these three teams added another loss due to their conference tournament. The solution is to play a better out-of-conference schedule where you win matches. This is why the WIAC didn’t suffer the same fate. UW-Stevens Point and River Falls each had 5 losses including the conference tournament but their overall schedule gave them more NPI points (for lack of a better phrasing). I have nicely been encouraging New England to step up their scheduling but it seems like NPI is going to take a harder line with them in 2024.  

I do want to say thanks to those in charge that put on the webinar and not kicking me out. I still don’t think the coaches are getting the full picture on how SOS is now something different and how it’s not as important to schedule as tough as in the past. The fall 2024 season will fix that, I guess.