Offensive Profiles: Out-of-System Strength

Being good when it's bad

Webinar Update
The In-System Offense Webinar is rescheduled for this Sunday, July 7, at 8pm New York Time. I apologize for the change, but we’ll set that one in stone now. I’ll post a couple more reminders on that this week and then I’ll send out the Zoom link on Sunday afternoon. Thanks for your patience on that. I’ll hit some middle attacking concepts that I think you’ll all really like and then connect that to setting up the rest of your offense. This webinar is for Premium Subscribers only, so if you’ve been thinking about upgrading, this is a great reason to do so!

Intro

In previous years, I’ve outlined the analytics framework I call The Triangle. If you need to get caught up, here’s the 4 main articles that outline the concept of the Triangle, as well as the 3 points of the Triangle.

The Triangle
Terminal Serving
First Ball
Transition

From this framework, I also built Team Profiles. These are diagnostic tools. Tell me my weak points, so I can work on them. They are also profiles of the different ways that teams can be successful. Tell me my strengths, so I can highlight them.

Terminal Serving Strength
Terminal Serving Weakness
First Ball Strength
First Ball Weakness
Transition Strength
Transition Weakness

Above all, the point of these tools are to improve your play on the court. Just running the numbers isn’t enough. How is that going to change how you’re going to train? How will it change the strategies you teach your players? Etc

This summer we’re taking another deep dive into the numbers as I share another layer of Team Profiles: Offensive Profiles. I’ll add the links here as I roll out this series:

Passing Strength
Passing Weakness
In-System Attacking Strength
In-System Attacking Weakness
Out-of-System Attacking Strength
Out-of-System Attacking Weakness
Balanced

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What Is An Offensive Profile?

I categorize 3 main components of Sideout Offense:

1. The ability to pass the ball In-System.

2. The ability to score when you do pass the ball In-System.

3. The ability to score when you don’t pass the ball In-System.

Do you pass well (or poorly)? Do you attack well (or poorly) when you’re running offense? Do you attack well (or poorly) when you’re out-of-system? Or are you about equally good (or bad) in all 3 areas?

A team can have a relative strength in one of these areas, a relative weakness in one of these areas, or be about equally proficient in all of these areas. The key here is the word relative. The team that’s 18-2 is probably better in all 3 of these areas than the team that goes 8-12. But the point of a profile is to compare the aspects of a team not to other teams, but to the other aspects within the same team.

What Do You Mean By Out-of-System Strength?

A team with an Out-of-System Strength profile is a team whose Out-of-System Attack proficiency is relatively stronger than the other two Offensive Factors: Passing and In-System Attacking.

I define a strength as an aspect that is at least 1 standard-deviation above the other two aspects. For example, a team that’s a bit above-average in Out-of-System Attack has an Out-of-System Strength if they are a bit below-average in Passing and In-System Attacking. But a team that’s weak (say 1 standard deviation below) in both Passing and In-System Attacking could be merely average in Out-of-System Attacking and still classify as an Out-of-System Strength profile. The point is that it’s relative to the other aspects within that team.

Why 1 standard deviation? I don’t know, it seems about right to me.

But more importantly, it’s not even about the specific statistical quantification. If you’re a high school coach, you don’t know what the standard deviation is for all of these aspects- although I will share some data as we go. But most coaches have a sense for the strengths and weaknesses of their teams. Where do you seem to gain an advantage? Where you do seem to have a disadvantage?

Some teams are balanced. That’s informative as well. Don’t assume you team is clearly skewed in one direction without taking some time to think about it.

Also, don’t assume your team has a strength in an area of the game, just because you WANT them to have a strength in that area of the game. You may value scrappy defense and smart transition play, but it may not have translated into results on the court. Yet.

How Common Are Teams With An Out-of-System Strength Profile?

In the 2023 NCAA Women’s season, 11 of the top-100 teams profiled with a Passing Weakness. This was a fairly common profile.

11 Teams - Passing Strength
6 Teams - Passing Weakness
12 Teams - In-System Strength
6 Teams - In-System Weakness
11 Teams - Out-of-System Strength
7 Teams - Out-of-System Weakness
51 Teams - Balanced (no extreme strength or weakness)¹

Here were the teams with an Out-of-System Strength profile.

It’s important to note that these are not necessarily the best out-of-system teams in the country; they are the teams most reliant on their out-of-system attacking to produce sideout offense. For example: UNI, Houston, UGA, Towson, Pitt, and Pepperdine were all among the 10-best OoS FBK teams in the country, but they profiled differently because of their other 2 areas of the game.

How Successful Were Teams With An In-System Strength Profile.

There were plenty of successful teams with In-System strengths. Eastern Illinois, Louisville, Texas, and Coastal Carolina were all over 80% Conference Win%.

If you just correlate conference Win% to OoS Index², there’s very little correlation, but it’s actually slightly negative, at -0.15. In a sample of only 100 teams though, I would want to see a much higher (or more negative) correlation before I did anything with that information. Look at the chart of Win% and OoS Index:

You do see that slight negative trendline, but you also see a lot of teams well above and well below the trend.

A final way to look at success is to look at the profiles of the most successful teams in the country. Of the teams that made the Regional Semifinals³, 2 teams had an Out-of-System Strength profile, including eventual champion Texas. So while there might be that slight negative correlation, again, we see that successful teams can be built by winning any 2 points of these Triangles, or dominating one aspect fully enough.

So What Are The Takeaways?

My 3 takeaways from looking at this analysis…

1. I was a little surprised that there weren’t more teams with this profile, and a little surprised there weren’t more high-profile teams with this profile. I think about a lot of the physical European teams in international volleyball and am a little surprised there aren’t big-name schools using their recruiting power to draw in big arms that can score on high balls. Maybe it’s a trend toward offensive speed, even at the juniors level, trickling upward.

2. But on the flip side to point (1), quite a few of those teams who are good OoS are not necessarily pure high ball teams. Texas was running really fast In-System bics. Louisville’s offense isn’t slow. So it’s possible to be dynamic In-System and still really good Out-of-System.

3. There were 4 teams that didn’t actually profile as OoS strength that I thought were interesting nonetheless. UNI, Houston, UGA, and Pitt all combined being in the top-10 in OoS FBK with being below 10% in DB%. UNI in particular was 5th-best in not allowing DBs and 4th-best in OoS FBK. And then, not surprisingly, they were undefeated in-conference. That’s a profile I’m pretty interested in: be great at saving aces and then be really good at killing the ball out-of-system.

I’ll unpack these concepts more as we go and next week we’ll look at teams who had a relative weakness Out-of-System.

1. These numbers add up to more than 100 because some teams classified in more than 1 profile.

2. Which is kind of a made-up state that just compares the Out-of-System Standard Deviation to the other 2 categories. In theory, a higher Out-of-System Index means a team is relatively more reliant on out-of-system attacking to score.

3. Aka “Sweet 16”