2022 NCAA Women's Preview

The 2022 NCAA women's volleyball tournament, whose bracket gets underway tomorrow, features several teams currently on hot streaks. National No. 3-seed Wisconsin has won 18 straight matches, No. 4 Stanford has done likewise, and No. 5 University of San Diego has won 24 in a row.

Here at VolleyMetrics, come tournament time, the primary metric we look at is the Conference-Adjusted Combined Offensive-Defensive (CACOD) score (explained here). In a nutshell, the CACOD reflects the extent to which a team hits for a high percentage and holds its opponents to a low hitting percentage. This season's CACOD scores for the 16 national seeds appear below in the final column, under the heading "adjratio." 

In the 11 years the CACOD has existed, no team with a value below 1.91 has won the NCAA women's tourney. Hence, the teams appearing above the yellow highlight are most likely to win the championship.

To my surprise, No. 7-seed Nebraska emerged with the highest CACOD in the nation. The Huskers' .244 hitting percentage is well below those of the highly seeded teams. However, Nebraska allowed its opponents to hit a microscopic .129 (see Huskers statistics page). Also helping Nebraska achieve the highest CACOD score is the conference adjustment. Because the competition, night in and night out, is strongest in the Big 10 and Pac 12 (in my view), schools in those conferences get their ratio of offensive to defensive hitting percentage multiplied by 1.25, which is a larger adjustment factor than for all other conferences.*

No. 1 Texas had nearly the same CACOD as Nebraska, but finished slightly below the Huskers due to the Big 12's smaller adjustment factor in my system. No. 2 Louisville and No. 3 Wisconsin -- who battled in a five-game national semifinal a year ago -- have the present season's next-highest CACOD scores. The Badgers' offensive-to-defensive hitting-percentage ratio is notably below the Cardinals', but the Big 10's greater adjustment factor than the ACC's lifts Wisconsin. The defending NCAA champion Badgers suffered a few early-season losses this season as they regrouped from the loss of some key seniors, but now are playing at a very high level. 

I'll analyze matches throughout the next few weeks, so please check back often!

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*The Pac 12 has not had the same competitive depth in recent years, compared to when Stanford, UCLA, USC, Washington, Oregon, and even Cal were all performing at nationally elite levels. However, I am reluctant to lower a conference's adjustment factor without more evidence.