Final 4 Preview

Previewing The Final 4

Earlier this week I broke down the round-of-8 matches:

Pitt - Kentucky and Louisville - Stanford
PSU - Creighton and Nebraska - Wisconsin

Now, let’s preview the upcoming matches. I sometimes split my Final 4 previews into two posts, but since I’m putting them both out today, I’m combining this into one big mega-post. Before we get to my preview and predictions, how about a SmarterVolley listener poll? Cast your vote!

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!

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Pitt v Louisville

Using their season statistics, let’s see how these teams match up:

Terminal Serving Points
Pitt - 59%
Lousville - 54%

Serve-In %
Pitt - 92%
Louisville - 90%

Ace Rate
Pitt - 7.9%
Louisville - 5.6%

Error/Overpass Rate
Pitt - 8.0%
Louisville - 9.1%

Pitt is likely the best in the country on the Terminal Serving front. They might be the only team at this level with more aces than reception errors, and they almost have as many aces as reception errors + overpasses. They’ve been outstanding on that side of the ball.

That said, if we look at what happened when they matched up against each other:

Pitt
7 Aces
17 Errors

Louisville
7 Aces
16 Errors

Louisville was actually 1 ahead in the Terminal Serving game!

What’s to be believed, the overall trend of the season, or what happened in 2 previous matchups? I tend to believe the bigger sample size, and my guess is that Pitt will earn a slight advantage in this area tonight.

Let’s look at First Ball

First Ball Points
Pitt - 58%
Louisville - 55%

MTP
Pitt - 85%
Louisville - 82%

FBK
Pitt - 43%
Louisville - 38%

First Ball Efficiency
Pitt - 0.370
Louisville - 0.278

Again, Pitt was pretty dominant here throughout the season. When you combine being very terminal (43% FBK!) with an 85% MTP rate, you’re going to be tough to beat. But let’s take a look at what happened in their two regular-season matchups: