To help predict the outcome of the MPSF tournament (and down the line, the NCAA championship), I'm using what I call my Combined Offensive/Defensive ranking. Its main feature is the ratio of a team's hitting percentage for the season divided by the hitting percentage it allowed its opponents. When teams come from different conferences (as in an NCAA tournament), I also apply a multiplicative weight to each team's ratio to represent strength of conference, yielding what I call the CACOD (Conference-Adjusted Combined Offensive/Defensive ranking). Because all teams in the MPSF tourney are from the same conference, there is no need to apply the weights.
The CACOD, which I introduced last fall for the NCAA women's tourney, was as successful as more-established ranking formulas at predicting the winners of the women's tournament matches.
In the table below, I show the COD values for the eight teams in the MPSF field, based on a statistics report from the league's website. Statistics were available for both the entire regular season and conference-only matches. The two would yield similar, but not identical, rankings when applying teams' own and opposition hitting percentages to obtain CODs. Whereas the conference-only stats might be best for predicting the conference tournament, the full-season stats might be best for predicting the outcomes of NCAA-tourney matches, especially since many of the MPSF teams played against top non-conference opponents such as Ohio State and Penn State during the season.
