And Then There Were 4
An exciting road to an all-chalk Final 4
I’ve been on the road a bunch the last couple weeks, so I haven’t had the chance to watch quite as much of the women’s NCAA tournament as I normally do. I’m looking forward to catching up on a bunch this week. Spoiler alert: Pitt, Louisville, Penn State, and Nebraska make the Final Four. There have been some upsets and some notable near-upsets on the way to the semifinals, but in the end, all four #1 seeds made it through.
Webinar Info: This Friday, Dec 20, I’m putting out a NCAA Finals Preview! I’ve done variations of this for the AVCA Convention in previous years and those were always really popular seminars. Since I’m not at the AVCA in-person this year, I figured I would put this out as a webinar. I’m traveling that Friday evening, so what I’ll do is open up a Subscriber chat or an Open Thread for Premium Subscribers to drop comments and questions. I’ll have some pre-recorded stats and analyses and then I’ll do some live Q&A of the questions/comments from subscribers. Get your questions in now!
Pitt - Kentucky
Let’s check out what some of the numbers say about the round-of-8 matchups, starting with Pitt v Kentucky:
First of all, this is the VM sheet, so don’t blame me for it saying the point differential is 12 points, not 13. My guess is there was either a challenge call that didn’t get properly switched or a non-kill/block/ace that didn’t get assigned as a “Won Point.” (Sometimes VM won’t credit either team with winning a rally on something weird like an off-ball net error or something.)
Well first we see here this being a classic 2-out-of-3 Triangle scenario with Pitt taking the Terminal Serves and First Ball battles, with a near-wash (Kentucky by 1) in the Transition game. Kentucky had a huge number of unforced errors and that was the difference maker. What’s interesting is a huge portion of those unforced errors being out the sideline, 12 of 15 by my count.1 Typically I think of attack errors out the sideline as being “avoiding the block errors” and I have a bias against making those errors. There’s also part of that being a pretty fast tempo team that’s hitting balls at tough attack angles. Just didn’t quite click against Pitt.
Both teams were low-MTP and high Deadball in terms of reception- a credit to tough serving by both teams. But Pitt only missed 7 serves to get that and Kentucky missed 11. Pitt’s been great all year at applying high service pressure with relatively low-error. To my knowledge they are the only major-conference team with more aces than errors over the regular season. That was huge for them again in a big match.
On the Pitt side another thing that stood out to me was >80% Sideout on medium passes. Granted, that only means 6/7 this match, but still, that’s a extra 1-2 sideouts than you would expect in that medium pass distribution. I watched their medium pass sideouts and…
Yeah, that’s about as good as you can do it on a medium pass in women’s college volleyball. Also yet another reason for setters to have more tools than just the standard left-right in their toolkit. This is sort of a left-right-bunny hop jump set but the key here is finishing square and firing straight down her midline to target. Phenomenal run on a long-distance set.
Louisville - Stanford
Usually you need to win 2-out-of-3 sides of the Triangle to win the match, so if you only win 1, you better win it big and boy did Louisville do that.
The teams were basically even in Terminal Serves, with Stanford’s typically high-pressure, higher-error strategy giving Louisville a fair amount of trouble while Louisville missed fewer but failed to get the Stanford passers in much trouble. Stanford’s Deadball % was just 4.4%- usually a winning number.
Stanford had a few more First Ball points than Louisville, but part of that is that Louisville simply had 20 fewer First Ball attempts.2 On an efficiency basis Louisville was a hair ahead and on an FBK basis it was pretty even.
Where Louisville really shown was their ability to terminate in Transition. Louisville had a few more digs, but Stanford was a bit better at Creating, so total transition attempts were only a 64 to 60 margin for Louisville. But they killed 30/64 while Stanford was just 14/60. Several Louisville players had multiple transition kills, but what stands out to me is 11 of Anna Debeer’s 15 kills coming in Transition. She only had 18 First Ball attempts in 4 sets which… isn’t nothing, but isn’t especially high-volume. But they fed her the ball in Transition and she delivered.
Here’s a cool Transition kill:
I’m a big fan of teams having alternative routes for their outside hitter who comes in tight to cover tip. It’s really hard to get all the way out to the left pin and generally what that means is that this player just doesn’t get set. I like this little fast shoot into the gap and a nice left-handed flush down into the daylight. Easy peezy.
But the majority of the kills were just standard-issue leftside high or medium-tempo balls in transition. The classic dirty work for an outside hitter. Here’s a nice one:
Controlled touch off the block, fairly easy transition, so they go pretty fast-tempo. Set stays a bit inside. Cross-body line. All good stuff.
Pitt and Louisville have had some great battles over the years and I’m expecting no different. I’ll drop some quick hits on the PSU-Creighton and Nebraska-Wisconsin quarterfinal matches tomorrow and then Thursday I’ll drop my Final Four previews before the matches start.
FWIW that pipe at 23-17 sure looks in on the scout film, what did the broadcast replay look like?
They won more rallies so they were serving more and Stanford’s aces and errors gave Louisville fewer attack attempts.