How To Beat: Louisville

Is "be really really good at volleyball" an acceptable answer?

And then there were 4! This NCAA tournament has been incredible so far. As one friend put it:

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to watch any of it live! I was running a private clinic for a club. The good news is (1) this gives me a chance to plug the public Offensive Concepts event this weeked in Wilmington, DE and (2) I’ve been able to catch up on the always-wonderful Volleymetrics machine.

Also, as this friend notes, I’ve been fortunate to have coaches from all the Final Four teams on SmarterVolley for coaching workshops!

Dave co-hosted our Q&A with Marv.
Alfee on Defensive Training
DBK on Setting
And… unfortunately Dan Fisher’s session isn’t available. Blame early-2020 understanding of how Zoom works.

So the lesson clearly is: become a premium subscriber to Smarter Volley and you too can learn how to coach exactly as good as any of these coaches in the Final Four. It works EXACTLY like that.

And speaking of the Final Four, I’ll spend some time before these matches looking at each of the teams and breaking down some of their profiles and what I would do if I was faced with the tough task of trying to beat any of them.

If you want to see the profiles from the other 3 teams, I’ll link them here as I release them.

San Diego
Pitt
Texas

Louisville

Triangle Profile

I’m using the Public Triangles method for this, which is a billion times faster than downloading dvw files from every match for each of these 4 teams, and sometimes the default dvw pulls from VM can miss a point or two here or there. But it’s all going to be pretty darn close, especially when we’re looking at a full season’s worth of data.

So, what are my initial thoughts?

First: Louisville is really really good. Next: So are the other teams in Final Four. Cool. So let’s look at the share of the game that each team plays in each phase:

The main difference that stands out between Louisville and Pitt is that Louisville tends to play a bit less of the match in Transition. Part of that is that teams missed a higher % of serves¹ against Louisville than normal. But that was true last year² too. Louisville: what secret magic do you have to get teams to miss serves against you?

Louisville plays a bit less of the game in Transition, but it’s not like, “drag the game into trans and beat them there,” is necessarily a good strategy. They won 56% of Transition rallies and have won the Transition battle in most of their matches this year. Louisville is great in First Ball and you have to match them, or at least not let them dominate this category, if you want to win. Here’s what you need to do: