Sixth-four teams are alive at the moment, but it sure looks like Nebraska (28-1) and Wisconsin (26-3) will meet for a third time this season to determine the NCAA women's volleyball championship (bracket). Both are No. 1 regional seeds, along with Pitt and Stanford.
Clearly the two dominant teams of the regular season, the Huskers and Badgers split their two B1G matches. Nebraska took an epic five-game tussle from Wisconsin on October 21 in Lincoln. Then, after dropping back-to-back road matches at Penn State and Purdue in mid November, Wisconsin smoked Nebraska on November 24 back in Madison (25-22, 28-26, 25-16); so gloomy was the loss that for the Huskers it really was a Black Friday! In Game 2, the Huskers led 22-19, only to have the Badgers score four straight to lead 23-22. The teams then battled back-and-forth, with UW holding game-points at 24-23 and 27-26, and NU holding them at 25-24 and 26-25.
My Conference-Adjusted Combined Offensive-Defensive (CACOD) metric, which takes a team's own hitting percentage divided by the hitting percentage it has allowed its opponent, multiplied by a conference-difficulty factor, appears below for the 16 nationally seeded teams. In the 12 years the CACOD has been around, no team below 1.91 has ever won the NCAA women's championship. Hence, if precedent holds, only seven teams really have a chance at the title (see column headed by "adjratio").
Oregon looks from its CACOD score to be the most likely non-No. 1 seed to make the Final Four. In addition, the Ducks closed the season winning 10 out of 12, the only two losses coming to Stanford.
I'll close for now with a piece of trivia: Penn State is "the only school to compete in every NCAA Division I Tournament since it started in 1981," a 43-year streak (link).
