With Stanford's win over Wisconsin for the NCAA national women's championship about a month ago coming so easily, 25-16, 25-17, 25-20, it was hard at first to come up with a statistical angle. The Cardinal, led by 6-foot-6 senior outside-hitter Kathryn Plummer's torrid spiking (.459 on 22 kills and 5 errors on 37 attempts), outhit the Badgers, .358-.152 ( box score ). Madeleine Gates, a Stanford graduate transfer who finished her degree at UCLA, also came up big (.529, 10-1-17). I've already written a lot on Plummer's hitting, however, so I wanted to focus on something else. Then, an idea from five years ago popped into my mind. As I wrote in February 2015 then-Penn State men's assistant coach Jay Hosack (now head men's coach at George Mason) noted on the Internet-radio show The Net Live that, "blocking should be evaluated more broadly than via direct stuff-blocks for points." For example, blockers could slow the ball down from a spike attemp
This year's NCAA women's Final Four, which begins shortly, features the Bears of Baylor, two of the B1G's three burrowing animals -- the Wisconsin Badgers and Minnesota Gophers* -- and a color, the Stanford Cardinal. By most accounts, Minnesota would probably be the team considered least likely to win the national title. Anecdotally, in watching some Gopher matches this season, my sense was that blocking was the team's strength. I therefore decided to compare the Final Four teams on their blocks per opportunity. The number of opportunities a team has to score points via a stuff block is the number of hit attempts by opponents, removing the number of spikes hit out of bounds or into the net. Such attempts gone awry can be calculated by taking opponents' aggregate hitting errors and subtracting those errors due to your own aggregate blocks. These calculations revealed all of the Final Four teams to be extremely similar in the proportion of blockable (i.e., not