Looking Back on Opening Weekend (First Two Rounds) of 2008 NCAA Women's Tourney

I've put together a bunch of statistics on last weekend's opening two rounds of play in the NCAA Division I women's volleyball tournament. Forty-eight matches were played (32 in the first round and 16 in the second), comprising roughly three-fourths of the tournament's total matches (63 are played, in all).

In these 48 matches, 179 total games (sets) were played. The type of result (i.e., sweeps, four- and five-game matches) broke down as follows:

3-0: 24
3-1: 13
3-2: 11

The closeness of many matches is illustrated by looking more closely at the five-game tilts. Five were decided by the minimum two points, another three were decided by the score of 15-12, and only three were decided by 5 or more points.

Regular readers of this site know that I consider hitting percentage to be a very important statistic. For each of the 179 individual games played over the first weekend, I examined each team's hitting percentage in relation to who won the game. In only 19 games (11%) did the lower-hitting team win the game.

The following chart shows the relationship between the margin by which the higher hitting team in a game outhit the lower hitting team (horizontal axis) and the probability of the higher hitting team winning the game (vertical axis).


Starting at the left, when a team outhit its opponent by a very small amount (.001-.049), it had about a 62% chance of winning the game (16/26, which is not significantly above a 50/50 chance probability). If a team outhit its opponent by a somewhat larger margin (.050-.099), it had a 78% chance of winning the game (25/32, which is significantly beyond chance).

The remaining bars in the graph tell us that, if one team's hitting percentage in a game is greater than its opponent's by .100 or more, the higher-hitting team was virtually certain to win the game. In fact, from this point onward, there were only two cases (out of 121 possible) where a team outhit its opponent and lost.

One of these instances occurred in Game 1 of the Illinois-Cincinnati match in the second round. Cincinnati recorded the better hitting percentage (.294 vs. .189, a difference of .105), but Illinois prevailed 26-24.

An even more extreme anomaly occurred in Game 3 of the second-round match between Florida and Colorado State. The Gators were victorious, 25-23, despite being outhit by the substantial margin of .226 (UF .107, CSU .333). For this one, I had to see what happened, so I consulted the online play-by-play sheet. The apparent reason why the Rams lost this game despite a hefty hitting advantage is that they made EIGHT service errors.

I also looked at some miscellaneous hitting statistics. Two teams stood out as super-consistent in particular matches, their game-to-game hitting percentages staying within a band of .100 percentage points throughout five games.

In a first-round win over San Francisco, Duke recorded the following hitting percentages in the five games: .255, .243, .243, .182, and .273 (box score).

Also in the opening round, Purdue hit for the following percentages in defeating Louisville: .333, .290, .333, .321, and .294 (box score).

I hope these statistics will give you something to think about as you await the next round, beginning Friday.