QWI (2021)

Our friend “Ned” from New England is the owner of the Quality Win Index that he created a number of years ago that attempts to gauge the strength of a schedule. You can find my previous article on this from him here. We always have Strength of Schedule (SOS) and the all-important SOS from the selection criteria but neither help us when trying to gauge the strength of a schedule before it’s played. The QWI attempts to do this. It can also be kept up-to-date throughout the year.

For those new to the QWI game, it’s a formula that’s based on rankings. This year, Ned is using Pablo (found on the Rich Kern site), Massey and Husker Geek. One issue with QWI that we’ll always have is that there are always issues with those rankings, especially this year coming off a Covid shorten schedule for only some of the teams nationally. Let me take a second to highlight some strangeness from these rankings. Pablo has Northwestern-St. Paul ranked 37^th where the other two systems have them in the low 20s. Husker Geek has Birmingham-Southern at 22 where the other two have them in the 30s and 40s. Massey is just crazy to be honest. They have so many strange rankings that don’t agree with the other two; St. Olaf at 4, Millikin at 7 and Johns Hopkins at 30 (the other two have them first). The point of using three is to normalize the results and find an average so maybe it’s not bad that one is just off at this point in the season. Ned will use the combined rankings on a sliding scale to award a team points based on who they are playing. For instance, if you are playing the number 1 team in the nation, you’ll be assigned 4 points initially. If you are playing a team ranked at 101 or lower then you’ll receive 0 points. Ned also gives bonus points out depending if it’s an away match and then applies a region factor to award teams points based on where the match is played in relation to your home region. Basically, you get points to travel. Here is the proprietary formula he said never to share with anyone:

OV = (pablo rank + Massey rank + Husker Geek rank) / 3

Match QWI = OV + (OV * AwayFactor) + (OV * RegionalFactor)

Funny, because I commented to Ned that we probably shouldn’t be giving bonus points to teams playing poor teams and his formula already accounts for that. Oh well, I’ll blame it on chemo brain and move on.

Ned will then take the Match QWI and add them up for a schedule and come up with the total QWI for a team. Below are the Top 10 toughest schedules based on QWI:

As a sanity check, let’s take a look at that Chicago schedule. First off, remember that Chicago plays in the UAA, which is typically one of the toughest volleyball conferences we have in DIII. Their out-of-conference matches include UW-Whitewater, Saint Benedict, St. Olaf, Illinois Wesleyan, Transylvania, Calvin, Millikin, UW-Stevens Point, UW-Oshkosh, UW-Eau Claire, Hope, Carthage, Elmhurst and Aurora. Yikes! You can see why they would be number one and QWI reflects that. It appears Chicago is not only going for the UAA title but also the WIAC title (where most of the good UW teams play)!

The Central and Midwest is always going to have an advantage in scheduling because they’re so many good teams within driving distance and they are willing to play good teams.

Now, some caveats. I have made a promise not to talk about bad scheduling this season because I believe there were a lot of hurdles put in front of programs this year. That doesn’t stop me from talking about Ned’s QWI thinking you scheduled poorly. I also noted that some schools still didn’t have their full schedule listed in the spreadsheet. This many impacted the lower performing schools.

Here are the Region X schools that fell within the Top 100 in schedules:

I think I’ve mentioned how good Trinity’s schedule is in other articles and we can see that QWI agrees with me. (An important factor in any model constructed.) I liked the UT-Dallas schedule but the ASC doesn’t have a big QWI number right now and that conference (with it’s change to one division) has limited availability to play outside of conference this season.

On the other side of the QWI rankings, with respect to the West, is Mills College but they have a limited schedule right now. Whether that will hold or not, I don’t know. Mills received 0 QWI points. The lowest ASC team was Mary Hardin-Baylor (QWI of 16.25 good for 178^th place), which is very discouraging. The lowest NWC team was Whitman (QWI of 11.49 good for 223^rd place). The NWC had our lowest conference QWI average, which just means (mainly) that the ranking system doesn’t value those teams as much as the other conferences. The lowest SCAC team was Austin College (QWI of 21.92 good for 140^th place). Not that bad, really. The lowest SCIAC team was Redlands (QWI of 25.80 good for 108^th place). Again, not bad at all and a function of how highly the ranking system like the SCIAC.

The bottom line is we’ll need to see the teams play before we worry too much about the QWI or SOS or any other model that is out there. Still, there is value here and it always interests me to see how different the QWI ends up being from SOS at the end of the year.

Some odds and ends to report from what Ned sent. Teams with the best out-of-region QWI were Cornell College, UW-Eau Claire and Hope. CMS was the highest finisher from Region X coming in at 10^th place. Teams with the best in-region non-conference QWI were Chicago, Concordia (WI) and Carthage. UC Santa Cruz was the highest finisher from Region X and in 9^th place. It makes sense to be UCSC because their conference doesn’t play matches and to fill out their schedule, they have to play the SCIAC teams.

I didn’t feel like averaging out the conference QWI numbers but the SCIAC came in around 24 points, the SCAC around 21 points, the ASC around 17 points, and the NWC around 5 points. Remember that the higher ranked teams get a lower QWI number because they don’t play themselves while the worst teams get a higher number because they are playing better teams.

That’s about it on QWI. I hope you enjoyed your Volleyball Eve article and that you’ll now be well educated when everyone is talking about it at the matches tomorrow.

Update – “Ned” has been putting the Region X teams QWI in the latest Conference Prediction articles. So, if you don’t see the Region X team you are interested above, go to that team’s conference article and check the comments. If you are a non-Region X team and would like to know…just ask in the comments.