24 NCAA Triangles Part 6

Transition Correlations

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 analysis.

Part 1: Terminal Serving Leaderboard
Part 2: Terminal Serving Correlations
Part 3: First Ball Leaderboard
Part 4: First Ball Correlations
Part 5: Transition Leaderboard
Part 6: Transition Correlations

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 Transition Details

Let’s go a little more into the sub-components of Transition and Win%, as well as look at the correlations between them and winning.

Transition and Win %

The correlation between Transition Win % and Win % is 0.844. That’s the highest of any of the 3 components:

0.35 - Terminal Serving
0.76 - First Ball
0.84 - Transition

What’s interesting is that the average share of rallies in First Ball is slightly more than the average share of rallies in Transition:

17% - Terminal Serving
43% - First Ball
40% - Transition

Based off that, you’d think First Ball would rank a little higher. So is Transition truly (slightly) more important than First Ball? Maybe. There could also be some contamination going on. For example, the serving team tends to win Transition rallies at a higher rate than the serving team- typically about 54% to 46%. So if you’re serving a lot, you’ll be a little better in Transition than if you’re receiving a lot. Also, serving a lot depresses your First Ball numbers slightly.

To test that, I tried looking at just hitting efficiency differential (your hitting efficiency - opponent hitting efficiency) in First Ball and Transition and correlating that to winning:

0.81 - First Ball
0.79 - Transition

Now things even out a hair.

So I feel comfortable in saying, not that either is more important than the other, but that First Ball and Transition are both really important and about twice as important as the Serve/Pass phase. Let’s see the scatter plot for Transition

You can see a strong trendline there, and I labeled a couple of the teams that won a bit more (above the line) or a bit less (below the line) than their transition differential would suggest.

Other correlations

0.13 - Transition Share
0.62 - Transition Efficiency
0.67 - Opponent Transition Efficiency

We know that the “Share” statistics are more a stylistic preference than a correlation to winning and losing. I’ll be curious to look at the correlations for Terminal Serving when I look at the men’s side in a little bit… do higher-error teams tend to win more there? Or more conservative teams? Regardless, for women’s volleyball, there doesn’t seem to be a clear indication that any particular style of play is more success than others. I don’t see anything in the data that makes me think, “okay you definitely need to focus more on First Ball than Trans,” or vice versa. I don’t see anything that suggests a particular strategy in Serve/Pass is necessarily better than another, with the possible exception that serving in might be underrated.

80% Thresholds

Now that I’ve shared most of the data analysis related to the Triangle for the 2024 women’s season, I’ll share the 80% Win Standards, as I see them.