2017 NCAA Women's Tourney Preview

The bracket for this year's NCAA women's tournament was announced Sunday night and play begins Thursday. One aspect of the draw raising some eyebrows is the No. 4 national seed for Kentucky (behind Penn State, Florida, and Stanford). The Wildcats went 17-1 in the SEC, splitting two matches with Florida, and 26-3 overall (match-by-match log). UK's two nonconference losses were to Creighton (9th seed in the NCAA field) and Kansas, whereas the Wildcats' best nonconference wins were over USC (10th seed) and Utah (11th seed).

Using my Conference-Adjusted Combined Offensive-Defensive (CACOD) rating system (described here), I peg Kentucky as having the 13th-best chance to win the national title. The chart below (which you can click on to enlarge) shows the CACOD rating (under "adjratio") for each of the 16 seeded teams. A team's own hitting percentage during the season is one of the major components of the CACOD and the Wildcats' (.321) was one of the best in the nation. However, UK allowed its opponents to hit .207 in the aggregate (the other major component of the CACOD), a fairly high value for elite tournament teams.

Note that in the six years since I developed the CACOD, no team with a value below 1.91 has won the NCAA title. Kentucky (1.55) would thus have to break some major new ground to win the championship. 

The NCAA seedings and the CACOD agree in placing Penn State in the No. 1 slot. The Nittany Lions' top hitting percentage among the 16 seeds, combined with a reasonably good defense, yields a 2.60 CACOD for Penn State. Texas and Nebraska are similar defensively, each allowing its respective opposition to hit just a little above .150. However, the Longhorns' superior offensive hitting percentage (.314 vs. .282) gives them an edge in the CACOD over Nebraska.

Stay tuned for updates throughout the tournament!

Nebraska Wins with Stunning Ease at Penn State

No. 2 Penn State suffered its first loss of the season last night, as Nebraska came into State College and swept the Nittany Lions, 26-24, 25-19, 25-20. The number that caught my eye was the Huskers' hitting percentage of .347. This was the highest hitting percentage Penn State had allowed an opponent since Minnesota put up a .374 in sweeping the Nittany Lions on October 29, 2016 in Minneapolis.

Nebraska entered the match with three losses on the season, to highly ranked Oregon and Florida in an opening-weekend tournament, and to Northern Iowa on September 16. As noted, Penn State's ledger was perfect before last night and included a pair of wins over defending national champion Stanford.

Volleyball Magazine Daily Releases of Women's Conference Previews (2017)

Over at Volleyball Magazine, each day they're releasing a preview of the upcoming women's season in a different conference. There's a lot of good information on each team in a given conference, including returnees, losses, and newcomers. I'll link to each preview as it comes out:

• ACC
• Big 12
• B1G (Big Ten)
• Pac 12
• SEC

Didn't We See This Movie Before? (2017 NCAA Men's Final)

A little over a week ago, for the second straight year, Ohio State swept BYU for the NCAA men's championship. Whereas last year's result was somewhat of a surprise, this year's was less so, as the Buckeyes were the host team for the Final Four.

As the following chart shows, similarity between the last two years' title matches went beyond the identities of the teams involved and the score. In particular, Ohio State's hitting percentage, as a team, was extremely similar in the 2016 and 2017 finals. BYU's spike attempts totaled 71 last year and 70 this year; each of these substantially trailed OSU's respective number of attempts, suggesting Cougar problems with serve-receipt, passing, and staying in-system.

Statistic	2017 (Box Score)	2016 (Box Score)
Score	OSU (25-19, 25-20, 25-22)	OSU (32-30, 25-23, 25-17)
OSU Hitting Pct.	.358 (42-13-81)	.374 (51-17-91)
Nicolas Szerszen .(OSU) H%	.480 (16-4-25)	.208 (10-5-24)
BYU Hitting Pct.	.243 (33-16-70)	.296 (34-13-71)
Ben Patch (BYU) H%	.333 (6 K-2 E-12 TA)	.091 (10-8-22)

The Buckeyes' Nicolas Szersen took virtually the same number of attack attempts in the two finals (24 last year, 25 this year), but hit much more efficiently this year. Maxime Hervoir, who has played for the French national team and attended two years of college in that country, added to the OSU attack this year, hitting .471 (10-2-17) in the final match. (He did not play in last year's final.)

BYU star Ben Patch, who battled injury most of the season, improved his hitting percentage from a year ago, but only had 12 attack attempts.

Preview of Women's NCAA Final: Texas vs. Stanford

My last posting, on the Final Four teams' success rate this season in five-game matches, turned out to be useless for the semifinals, as neither match went the distance. Maybe tonight's final will...

Things haven't exactly gone as expected. The vaunted Big 10 conference (abbreviated B1G), which had the three highest national seeds -- Nebraska, Minnesota, and Wisconsin -- has no finalist. Also, this year will be the first in the six years I've compiled my Conference-Adjusted Combined Offensive-Defensive (CACOD) measure that a national title winner will be below a score of 1.94. The two finalists are close though, Stanford at 1.91 and Texas at 1.79.

I found Stanford's four-game semifinal win over Minnesota surprising, but the Cardinal had defeated the Gophers, also in four, way back on August 28.

My reaction to the other semi, which also involved a rematch from the regular season, was: What the hell happened? Defending national champion and this year's No. 1 national seed Nebraska had not merely swept, but routed Texas (25-15, 25-16, 25-21) on August 27. In the national semis, however, the Longhorns returned the favor, sweeping the Huskers!

Certainly, improved defense was a major for the Longhorns' turnaround. UT let Nebraska hit .304 in the teams' first match (with only 5 total blocks for the Horns), whereas Texas held the Huskers to .182 in the rematch (with 10 blocks).

Offensively, Longhorn frosh outside-hitter Micaya White struggled mightily in the first Nebraska match (hitting in negative territory, -.143, with 3 kills and 6 attack errors on 21 attempts). However, she improved to a solid, if unspectacular .269 (7-0-26) the second time around.

Another key player for Texas tonight will be fellow OH Ebony Nwanebu. She hit .378 (15-1-37) in Thursday's semifinal match and .333 (13-3-30) in the early-season match against Nebraska. Although now based in different conferences, Nwanebu and Stanford should be pretty familiar with each other. The reason, as close followers of the women's college game are aware, is that Nwanebu began her career at Stanford's Pac-12 rival USC, before transferring to Texas after her sophomore year. As the following chart shows, Nwanebu had some big matches as a Trojan against Stanford and generally committed few hitting errors.

Stanford combines a very youthful line-up (perhaps a reason for the team's slow start this season) with the experience of Inky Ajanaku, a fifth-year middle-blocker who missed last season with an ACL injury. Ajanaku finished sixth in the nation in blocks per game at 1.52. This article describes Ajanaku as the "grandma" of the team, noting also that she's a "wannabe orthopedic surgeon."

The big question, then, is whether the title will go to the wannabe or the Nwanebu.

UPDATE: Stanford takes it in four.

Final Four Teams' Records in Five-Game Matches

There seem to have been a lot of five-game matches this year, both in the regular season and in the NCAA tournament. Some of the Final Four teams went five in roughly a quarter of their matches this season. Here's how the remaining teams fared in five-game matches:

Texas: 4-3 overall; 2-1 home; 2-2 road

Nebraska: 4-1 overall; 2-0 home; 2-1 road

Stanford: 4-4 overall; 1-3 home; 2-1 road; 1-0 neutral

• Included in Stanford's record is a win over visiting Cal Poly. How did the Cardinal even let Cal Poly take the match to a fifth game?

Minnesota: 5-3 overall; 4-0 home; 1-3 away

• Interestingly, the Gophers closed B1G conference play with four straight five-game wins, all at home.

2016 NCAA Women's Tourney Preview

With this year's NCAA women's tournament getting underway today (brackets), I'm back with my Conference-Adjusted Combined Offensive-Defensive (CACOD) measure to forecast teams' success. The CACOD simply divides a team's own hitting percentage during the regular season by the overall hitting percentage it allowed its opponents, and then multiplies the resulting ratio by an adjustment factor to reward being in stronger conferences (details here). Teams that hit well and don't allow their opponents to do so will get the highest CACOD scores.

I have been calculating the CACOD for the past five years. The following table (which you can click to enlarge) shows scores for all teams making the Elite Eight during that time frame. Again, CACOD scores are based entirely on regular-season play (i.e., NCAA-tourney games are not factored in), so they can be judged for their prognostic efficacy.

The table tells us three main things, in my view:

• No team below a CACOD of 1.94 has won the national championship during the five years I've computed the statistic. Thus, if your favorite team is well below a CACOD of 2.00, it is unlikely to ascend the victory podium. 
• Although we're talking small sample-sizes, the CACOD appears to distinguish eventual national-championship teams (mean = 2.43) from national runners-up (1.90), losers in the national semifinals (2.03), and losers in the Elite Eight (1.96). However, it does not differentiate the latter three groups from each other.
• Only twice in the past five years has the team with the very highest CACOD won the NCAA title (Penn State in 2013 and 2014). One leader lost in the national semis (Penn State, 2012), one lost in the Elite Eight (Washington, 2015), and one even lost in the round of 32 (Nebraska, 2011). 

So which teams have the highest CACOD scores this year? The next table tells us...

No. 1 seed Nebraska leads the way by a sizable margin, with a CACOD of 2.56. Penn State, though seeded all the way down at 16, has the second-highest CACOD (2.10). The Nittany Lions frequently do well on the CACOD, which I take as a sign of its "face validity." Unfortunately for Penn State, it would have to play Nebraska in the Sweet Sixteen. Several discrepancies between teams' seeds and their CACODs are evident. Eleventh-seeded Florida has the third-highest CACOD, whereas fourth-seeded Texas has only the tenth-highest CACOD.

We'll see how well the CACOD performs as the games get underway!