Ranked Results Mistake?

I can’t just give it a rest for one day, right? Regionals start tomorrow. By the way, if your team is playing in the Berry, Cornell, Hope or UW-Oshkosh Regionals, then Ricky Nelson has a Regional Guide for you to look at! For the West Coast teams that is everyone except for CMS. To help everyone at the MIT Regional as to what to expect from CMS, here is my quick regional guide:

CMS employs the rare 4-2 system having the player in the front middle setting. On defense, they use a hybrid middle up defense where not only the middle back player plays up at the 10m line, but the right and left defender do, too. What makes this unusual is that the team doesn’t block. They pull the front row players to the back line creating a formidable 6-back defense. This can cause issues in the attack and you’ll often see the libero attacking from the backrow while not jumping to ensure there are no attacking violations. We are unsure about who coaches the team as the entire staff can often be found at the nearest casino during matches. Oh, most famous attendee: That guy begging in front of Aruffo’s.

I hope that helps.

Well, that was fun but maybe not the best intro for what I wanted to write about today. Ricky Nelson wrote about how the datasheets didn’t match up with the Ranked Results for some teams. The problem seems to be with the three new teams added to the final published regional rankings. The three teams were Millikin, Coe and Stevenson. By rule, all teams in the third published release are considered ranked teams and any added in the final release are also considered ranked teams. Simply put, if the datasheets don’t show the correct data, then the program the RACs and Selection Committee used (which generates the datasheet) were populated with the incorrect information.

I have reached out to the Selection Committee Chair (Sam Atkinson) and Vice-Chair (Drew Hargrave) for comment. I also copied the NCAA contacts that oversee the process (Victoria Lipscomb and Ryan Richardson).

There are a number of questions around this potential mistake. I guess the biggest is whether a team was bypassed because of this or a team received a bid that maybe they shouldn’t have? I will certainly look at this in a Case Study down the road. For now, here are the NCAA Tournament and bubble teams that were potentially impacted by this issue.

Teams shown with their potentially lost ranked wins and losses.

Calvin 0-1 Carthage 2-1 Centre 0-1 Cornell College 2-0 Eastern 2-0 Gettysburg 0-1 Gustavus Adolphus 1-0 Ithaca 0-1 IWU 0-1 Johns Hopkins 1-0 Kean 0-2 Mary Washington 1-0 Nebraska Wesleyan 1-1 North Park 1-0 Northwestern 1-0 Ohio Northern 1-0 Otterbein 1-0 Salisbury 1-0 St Olaf 0-1 Stockton 0-1 UW-Eau Claire 2-0 UW-Oshkosh 1-0 UW-Platteville 1-1 WashU 1-0 UW-Whitewater 2-0

The teams that are probably the most interesting to look at are Carthage, UW-Eau Claire and UW-Platteville. These are all Region VIII teams. In my selection article, I though UW-Platteville deserved a bid. In Ricky’s selection article, he thought both UW-Platteville and UW-Eau Claire deserved bids. (This was, of course, before we knew what teams were being added to the rankings.) We don’t know the unpublished ranking that Region VIII had to produce. We know that Millikin was 7^th (made public and received a bid) and that UW-Stevens Point was 8^th (because they also got a bid). We don’t know who sat in that 9^th spot and was up for consideration. How will each of those teams do against Christopher Newport or Stevenson or whomever we may think was the last at-large team chosen. Again, we’ll look at that in a future Case Study.