NCAA Triangles Pt3

The Transition Game

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 Transition 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 Transition side. I’ll add links to each piece of this series as I release them:

NCAA Women: Terminal Serving
NCAA Women: First Ball
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 Transition Points?

Transition Points were about 40% 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, as we’ve seen so far. 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. As we’ve noted, NCAA teams just take a bit more risk (but not much!) with their serving. All told, half of top-level juniors rallies that are not Terminal Serves go into Transition, and almost half (47%) of NCAA tournament rallies that were not Terminal Serves went into Transition.

How Did Transition Effect Winning And Losing?

The average edge of a winning team in Transition was +10.1, the highest differential of any of the three sides of the Triangle. Transition was a big deal in the NCAA tournament! So even though a little less of the game was played in Transition than First Ball, the spread between winning and losing teams was bigger in Transition. Let’s dive into a few more ways to look at the data.

The team that won Transition won the match a shocking 87% of the time. This seems almost impossibly high (and it likely 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 still. Jeez.

Let’s bring up the “two sides of the Triangle” or “one side of the Triangle” numbers:

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

To me, this evens out the, “is First Ball or Transition more important,” debate a bit. It’s difficult to rely on only one factor (and why would you?) and the two-factor combination that’s most successful is clearly both First Ball and Transition. Very few matches were won by Transition only. But, for completeness, they were:

Rice > Colorado
Auburn > Creighton
USD > Stanford

I profiled some of USD’s Transition ability in the Final 4 preview. They were outstanding in that phase¹ and were able to ride that to a Regional Semifinal win. If you're a team with a Transition Strength, those are good matches to study.

Of course, a lot of coaches are also noting that Transition is the most downstream side of the Triangle. Tough serving and good passing sets up First Ball success. First Ball success sets up Transition success. None of this stuff is in a vacuum. It’s just worth noting that a lot of these matches get won and lost in Transition. It’s kind of a pointless debate about whether First Ball or Transition is more important, so we’ll just leave it at: ignore the Transition phase at your own risk.

How Did Transition Impact The Top Teams?

Let’s take a look at Transition by the 4 semifinalists: Texas, Louisville, San Diego, Pitt.

The Texas numbers are almost comically good. Absolute domination in this phase. The USD numbers were actually looking really good until the semifinal, but that match brought that number way down.

Louisville earned a significant advantage in Transition as well. Pitt was also good in Transition, although we saw that they relied on Terminal Serving more than any of the other 4 teams.

Let’s look at the offensive and defensive numbers.

And look at those same numbers when compared to the average Trans efficiency of 0.210:

Blahblahthetexasnumbersareridiculousblahblah I don’t have the energy for any more of that.

All 4 teams were plus offensively, with Pitt losing the Transition edge on defense, not on offense. I commented on this in the Finals Preview, but that was paywalled, so I’ll post the video here. One of Texas’ big advantages is how good they are at keeping the ball inside. They almost never miss their outsides wide. This is important in First Ball, but even more critical in Transition when you are in medium/high ball situations a lot.

More from that same post:

This is already part of Texas’s system; this wasn’t a specific adjustment they made. It’s interesting because this is something I often get some contention over when I do my Offensive Concepts seminars.

There’s sometimes a feeling of, but my setters are good enough to push the ball all the way out. That’s not the point! Your hitters have more options when they are a little inside, and you give yourself more room for error. If you aim 1m inside, and you miss by a little, your hitter is still in an okay spot. When you aim all the way out, and you miss by a little, now your hitter is past the antenna and screwed.

I show this slide at these seminars:

I find this has a huge impact on transition efficiency and I see Texas executing this better than any NCAA team right now. And we see it show up in the stats.

Transition In The Final Four

Let’s look at the Transition matchups in the 3 matches of the Final 4- both semifinals plus the championship match.

Wow, absolutely staggering numbers. It’s tough imagine anything being more decisive in the 3 most critical matches of the season. Transition was absolutely the make-or-break factor of the game in all 3 of these matches.

It’s also shocking how big of a differential it was. Louisville going from +22 in Trans against Pitt to -17 against Texas is a massive swing.

It also shows how the Transition game can be unpredictable, and it shows how it can be downstream of other factors. Part of why Louisville dominated the Transition game against Pitt was their serving. Sometimes that shows up in First Ball, but sometimes when the other team isn’t making errors in First Ball, it’s because you’re digging them… and then winning rallies in Transition.

I think it is for this reason that a lot of coaches in the NCAA prioritize First Ball execution. If you kill the ball in First Ball, you don’t let the other team get into Transition. If you slow your opponents down in First Ball, you create more Transition opportunities for yourself. Nothing wrong with that approach, and it’s been the approach I’ve favored for a long time.

One of the things it also shows me is the importance of the Dig → Create → Convert chain. I’ve talked about that concept on the beach before, but it’s important for indoor teams as well. I think too many teams focus on the Dig aspect and not enough on the Create and Convert aspects. Transition ends when we kill the ball.

Conclusions

So there we go, that wraps up our Major Competition Analysis January for the NCAA side. The later posts this week will hit the FIVB Women and FIVB Men’s World Championships. Then we’ll rotate back to Beach Week and wrap up January with some Mailbag questions from you readers.

Things have been really numbers-heavy lately, so as we get into the spring, we’ll shift away from statistically-oriented posts to some teaching and learning concepts, including breaking down my favorite coaching books and some takeaways that might give you all new ides.

I am curious to hear from the readers. What were your takeaways now that you see all the numbers? There have been a few good comments already over the past couple months as I’ve been putting out the NCAA Tournament analysis, so keep them coming. I’ll hit all them in the mailbag at the end of the month.

1. Obligatory “Texas was better” that is going to annoy the crap out of all of you every time I post any NCAA analysis from this season. Just be glad this Substack wasn’t around in 2008.