Tournament Preview “The Rest” (2025)

This is the last article in my Tournament Preview series. Like my last one, this one will have more cut/paste and be less verbose than my first two. This one covers tournaments after Week 3 that include Region X, C2C or SAA teams. For each tournament I looked at the average NPI from 2024 of the teams involved and also tracked statistics loss, average record and Points/Set.

Tournaments are listed by strength. I have the complete table at the bottom of this article along with the tables from my earlier articles. As a bonus, I’ll give you the Top 5 Overall Tournaments here:

The top tournament will be discussed below while the others were discussed in previous articles. We knew that Oshkosh and, to a lesser extent, Trinity had tough schedules. Each hosts two of the top five toughest tournaments I looked at in this series.

As a reminder, I was lazy and didn’t put table headings in. The numbers are statistics loss due to graduation, 2024 Points/Set, 2024 win-loss totals and 2024 NPI. The NPI number is not normalized here. The bottom line are the averages with the NPI normalized as presented by the NCAA. Oh, the final column is whether the team received an automatic qualifier (A) or an at-large bid (C).

Well, this first tournament is the best for of the rest as well as being the best overall of the tournaments I examined. I mean any tournament with Juniata and Johns Hopkins in it will be hard to beat but look at those statistics lost numbers. Their 2024 teams will not be their 2025 teams so hope for Chris Newport and Nazareth. Nazareth really does look out of place here and they are also suffering some significant graduation losses. I have the first three teams ranked in my preseason rankings so even with some rebuilding going on, this will be a great tournament.

Our second best of the rest just missed out on the overall Top 5 but it’s still a great one. We’ve got two Elite 8 teams here (as we did in the previous tournament) along with Berry who really turned it on late last season and a good Randolph-Macon team. Randolph-Macon returns the most talent here but is probably starting too far back with respect to Points/Set to make that up. Still, these should be competitive matches. This will also be one of the last tournaments of the year so a big test going into the conference tournaments.

I was critical of Gallaudet’s schedule last season but you can’t deny that this will be an excellent test for all of these teams. Gallaudet actually returns the most talent with Franklin & Marshall right behind. Big test for Whittier in this one as they had the second lowest Points/Set of these teams in 2024.

Regent won’t be an active DIII program until 2028 so their matches will not factor in the standings or NPI. The other three teams should all be really good with a side benefit of seeing Hannah Smith play against her old VWU squad now that’s she on Salisbury. I think she tips the scales here and allows Salisbury to have a really good weekend.

This is less of a tournament and more like a mini-C2C conference matchup as all four teams are in the C2C but none of this counts as a conference match. Strange, I know. With Salisbury picking up the aforementioned Hannah Smith, this probably becomes a battle between CNU and Salisbury and then a battle between Mary Washington and UCSC.

With an average NPI of 58.4, this is a fantastic group of teams coming together the last week of the regular season. The Centre/CNU matchup should be particularly interesting and fun to watch.

This one has three conference winners and will be a very tough test for Oglethorpe. Covenant looks to return the most and it will be interesting to see how they do against Berry and ETBU who lost some talent but who are probably still better. I’m not going to bet on that, however.

I will be fascinated with how well (or bad) HSU does in this one. They were a very tough team last season and this will be a big challenge for them. The WIAC schools will not play each other here so they should have an easier time with the group.

(Sorry for the formatting on this table.)

With the ASC and SCAC having a number of open dates, a tournament like this makes sense. Throw in UC Santa Cruz who never turns down an opportunity to play and you have a competitive group of teams.

Our last tournament from the rest comes in with a still respectable 53.1 average NPI. Salisbury should be good here but Kean playing at home will be a tough out for them. Both Alfred and Drew look to be returning almost their entire squad so they could surprise here.

Whew! That does it for this series of articles. I hope all of the numbers made sense as I didn’t present it in the best way. You definitely see a lot of C2C teams in these extra tournaments simply because they need to get matches in without a conference schedule. Remember that all of these numbers are from 2024 and we’re only a couple of weeks away from creating new numbers. Getting excited!

Below are the tables that rank the tournaments by NPI. I have kept the tables from the first three articles in this series, as well.

The Rest

Week 3

Week 2

Week 1