NCAA Tournament Triangles Pt2

First Ball

January is all about major-competition analysis! I’m applying the Triangle analysis to three recent major competitions in indoor volleyball: the NCAA Women’s National Championshp, the FIVB Women’s World Championship, and the FIVB Men’s World Championship. This week we’re focusing on First Ball and how that was applied in each tournament.

Today we’re looking at the 2022 NCAA Women’s National Championship Tournament. Specifically, we’re looking at the First Ball phase. I’ll add links to each piece of this series as I release them:

NCAA Women: Terminal Serving
NCAA Women: Transition
FIVB Women: Terminal Serving
FIVB Women: First Ball
FIVB Women: Transition
FIVB Men: Terminal Serving
FIVB Men: First Ball
FIVB Men: Transition

How Common Were First Ball Points?

First Ball Points were about 45% of points scored in the NCAA Tournament. If we break it down by Triangle phase:

15% Terminal Serves
45% First Ball Points
40% Transition Points

First Ball was the most common phase of the game, and we’ll see this be true for the two other major competitions. The fact that the men miss so many more serves (and get aced a bit more, when the serve does go in) also makes the game seem more First Ball-dominant. There’s only a bit more First Ball play than Transition play in the NCAA women’s game, while there’s nearly twice as much First Ball play than Transition play in the FIVB Men’s game.

We see this distribution not being too far off the U-17s Juniors analysis I shared in November:

12% Terminal Serves
44% First Ball Points
44% Transition Points

Which makes sense; top U-17 teams are the feeder programs to the NCAA, so their game is going to start to resemble that level. And, as we noted last week, NCAA teams just take a bit more risk (but not much!) with their serving.

How Did First Ball Effect Winning And Losing?

The average edge of a winning team in First Ball was +6.1 and the standard deviation was 7.8. Both of these effects were bigger than Terminal Serving. The average First Ball differential was a bit smaller than the average Transition differential, but the standard deviation was higher.

The combination of (a) greater overall share of points and (b) bigger variance leads me to think that First Ball would have the greatest effect on winning. But is this what we see in the data?

The team that won First Ball won the match 82% of the time. This is really high! Some of this is skewed by the fact that there’s quite a few mismatches in early rounds of the tournament; there are a lot of dominant matches in the early rounds of NCAAs where one team wins all 3 sides of the Triangle. But now let’s view First Ball’s effect on winning in a few other ways.

Number of Two Sides Of The Triangle Wins:
3 Terminal Serving + First Ball
8 Terminal Serving + Transition
17 First Ball + Transition

Number of One Side Of The Triangle Wins:
0 Terminal Serving Only
5 First Ball Only
3 Transition Only

There were 5 matches won only the First Ball side of the Triangle and still won the match:

UNI > Florida State
Houston > Auburn
Purdue > Tennessee
Baylor > Rice
Oregon > Nebraska

We’ve talked before about Team Profiles before, so these matches are good ones to study if you are a team with a First Ball Strength.

It’s clear to look at those stats and determine that First Ball ability was a bigger predictor of success than Terminal Serving ability. It’s not so clear when you compare First Ball ability to Transition ability. We’ll dive deeper into that comparison next week.

How Did First Ball Impact The Top Teams?