24 NCAA Triangles Part 1

Terminal Serving Leaderboard

2024 NCAAW Season Analysis

Every year on SmarterVolley I have at least one content cycle that’s based around extensive statistical analysis of a large data set. American NCAA Women’s volleyball is pretty good at providing that, so I tend to pull heavily from data from the fall NCAA seasons, but some of the past analysis includes FIVB stuff, men’s stuff, etc.

2023 Defensive Analysis
2023 Offensive Analysis
2022 Major Competition Analysis
2021 Triangle Profiles

All of these have a similar flavor to them and I use many of the same tools, but I try to come at things a little differently each year so you won’t get bored and cancel your subscription can see some of the different methods of analyzing teams. Let’s dive into this year’s

Quick notes:

First of all, if you are unfamiliar with the Triangle analysis framework or some of the other terminology I use here, check our the Triangle Primer that I updated for this year.

Second, some details on the data-set: I used the top-100 teams in the NCAA and pulled all of their dvw files from all matches. I didn’t exclude any matches, so everything regular-season and playoffs is in here. Also, Drake is not in here, even though they were top-100 in NCAA. Every now and then a match won’t important properly into Volleystation but for whatever reason more than half of Drake’s matches didn’t important properly. So… nothing from Drake in here. Sorry about that folks.

2024 Leaderboard: Terminal Serving

Let’s take a look at the teams which led the NCAA in Terminal Serving, both overall and in the various sub-components.

Terminal Serving Leaders

Nebraska topped the charts this season by winning an eye-popping 65% of the Terminal Serves in their matches. To be specific, let’s look at their sub-components:

93.4% Serve-In
84.9% Opponent Serve-In
5.2% Ace
3.6% Opponent Ace

Or, in just raw totals:

153 Aces to 79 Opponent Aces
193 Serve Errors to 342 Opponent Serve Errors

That’s a 223-point advantage in this category. Over a 36-match season, that’s a 6-point per match advantage. Pretty nice to have if you’re this good in that category.

Let’s break down the sub-components and see some of the other leaders from this season.

Terminal Serving Share Leaders

Here’s the teams where Terminal Serving was the biggest part of their matches:

I’m not sure this information necessarily reveals anything too insightful, other than that these teams are mostly aggressive serving teams who are high-error, high-ace, as we’ll see below. For this profile of team, about 20% of plays end with a Terminal Serve (ace or error) and about 80% go to the rally phase. Interestingly enough, this level of women’s volleyball (including pro ball, of which a lot of NCAA is comparable to) is probably the lowest Terminal Share Share environment of any type of volleyball that’s played. High school aged volleyball will typically be something like 25-33% Terminal Serve and youth volleyball even more. And men’s volleyball is generally more like 25% since the error rate is higher.

I suspect this is why some of the correlations around serving and winning are lower in women’s NCAA than some other levels. In particular, just serving in is a reasonably successful strategy, as I mention below.

And here’s the teams where Terminal Serving was the smallest part:

DePaul is out here playing for the fans. As we’ll see below they missed the fewest serves in the NCAA, they didn’t serve many aces, and they didn’t allow many aces. Overall we see the other end of this range largely being occupied by teams who serve in a lot and don’t allow many aces. At this end, you’re looking at something like 85% of rallies entering the attacking phase.

Ace % Leaders

You probably won’t be surprised that none of these teams are also in the Serve-In% leaders. Pitt was only a couple spots out of the top-10 and they served in a lot, which is why their overall ratio was so high. But, as a general trend, it does seem to be that if you want to approach 8% Ace in NCAA volleyball, you are going to miss more than 10% of servers. Pitt was 7.7% Ace and 7.6% Error, the only team in this sample (and thus, probably in all of D1) with more aces than errors.

This is a big separation between NCAA and high school volleyball. Many hs/club teams serve more aces than errors. (And thus, volleyball at the high school level is generally between 25-40% Terminal Serving Share, rather than 15-20% like we see in the NCAA).

Opponent Ace % Leaders

You can just look at the Win% there and see that ace prevention is going to be pretty well-correlated with winning. Combine this data with opponents missing a ton of serves against Nebraska and it’s no wonder their overall Terminal Serving number was so good.

Being 4% Opponent Ace means you’re going to average 1 or fewer aces given up per set, which is really impressive. That means you’re going to also want to be good in Transition, because you’re keeping more balls in play. For those of you who play Aceball, in order to get to this standard, you’d need to play 24-19 starting score instead of the 23-19 (or even 22-19) score that most teams need to play.

Serve-In Leaders

Congrats to Depaul, Queens of serving in! Last year’s analysis showed a surprising (to me) correlation between serving in and winning. Next week we’ll see if it holds up for this year.

Opponent Serve-In Leaders

I’m including this more for fun than a measure of team ability. Maybe these teams were better at Letting Them Serve Out? It is worth noting that Nebraska leads this figure basically every year. At some point I’ll do a long-term study on it and figure out how much their home court advantage is worth, just based on opponent missed serves. Other than that, probably a lot of this is luck.

Next week I’ll bring in some scatter-plots and correlation and see how these components compare influenced winning and losing.