We began our analysis of the nation's top women's college liberos with Part I on serve receipt (plus an addendum). Today, we unveil Part II on digging. As I've noted before, the ideal way to evaluate liberos would be with quality ratings of each contact, such as difficulty level of each dig and whether the dig leads to a team running its offense in system. Lacking such fine-grained ratings, however, I must rely on publicly available, online box scores.

When looking at serve-receipt, I initially evaluated USC's Natalie Hagglund, Iowa State's Kristen Hahn, and Michigan State's Kori Moster. Then, based on suggestions from readers at VolleyTalk, I added three more liberos: Nebraska's Justine Wong-Orantes, Hawai'i's Ali Longo, and the University of San Diego's C'era Oliveira. I also have a local interest in Texas Tech's Rachel Brummitt, an excellent libero whose performances may go "under the radar" nationally. I concluded from the …

Last Friday, I introduced my statistical examination of the top women's college liberos with an analysis of serve-receipt statistics (link). Using methods described in that earlier posting, I created a measure called S2R (for success-squared times receipt activity) and reported scores for Natalie Hagglund (USC), Kristen Hahn (Iowa State), and Kori Moster (Michigan State). I also invited readers to suggest additional liberos for statistical analysis. In response to a message I posted on VolleyTalk about my original analysis, an online discussion ensued in which commentators listed other liberos they thought were among the nation's best. These additional liberos are Justine Wong-Orantes (Nebraska), Ali Longo (Hawai'i), and C'era Oliveira (University of San Diego).

As I noted in my previous posting, one needs a "detailed" box score (which goes beyond the statistics in an ordinary box score) to compute the S2R score. In scouring the Internet for matches played by…