Offensive Profiles: Passing Strength

Extending the Triangle

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.

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 Passing Strength?

A team with a Passing Strength profile is a team whose passing proficiency is relatively stronger than the other two Offensive Factors: In-System Attacking and Out-of-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 Passing has a Terminal Passing Strength if they are a bit below-average in In-System and Out-of-System Attacking. A team that’s above-average (say, 1 standard deviation) in In-System and/or Out-of-System attacking would need to be very good (at least 2 standard deviations above average) to still have a Passing Strength.

Remember me???

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 A Passing Strength Profile?

In the 2023 NCAA Women’s season, 11 of the top-100 teams profiled with a Passing Strength. This was about as common as most profiles:

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 a Passing Strength profile.

So a bit of a mix between smaller schools and bigger schools. Some really strong teams as well as some teams more toward the bottom of the top-100. Kansas, Iowa State, and TCU make the Big 12 the conference most represented in Passing Strength profiles, for whatever you make of that.

It’s important to note that these are not necessarily the best passing teams in the country; they are the teams most reliant on their passing to produce sideout offense. 5 of the top-10 Passing teams² didn’t qualify as a Passing Strength profile because they were as-good or close-to-as-good in another area of the game.

How Successful Were Teams With A Passing Strength Profile?

Clearly, there were some successful teams with a Passing Strength profile. SMU, SELU, and Nebraska all had over 90% Win% in conference.

If you just correlate conference Win% to GP Index³, there’s basically no correlation. It was 0.05. This doesn’t mean that relying on passing makes you win less, it just means that you could win by relying on your passing or you could win without relying on your passing.

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 Semifinals⁴, only Nebraska was a Passing Strength profile. But with 11/100 of the top-100 RPI being Passing Strength profiles, we’d only expect about 1 or 2 teams to make the top-16.

So What Are The Takeaways?

My 3 takeaways from looking at this analysis:

1. You can pass your way to championship contention. Nebraska has done it for years and again this year they were in the Final 4, in large part due to their passing. You also can do it at a variety of levels. Nebraska succeeded in the top conference and in the NCAA tournament, SMU was 18-1 in a mid-major conference, and SELU 17-1 in small-conference volleyball behind Passing Strength profiles.

2. On the flip side, most readers will note that Nebraska’s championship loss happened when they lost their passing edge. This brings up painful memories for me of the 2016 Olympics where our USA team, the best passing team in the world for most of the last 3 years had a below-average passing match in a 5-set loss to Serbia.

3. An opinion here, but I don’t think you can be a strong passing team just because you want to be. At the NCAA level, the way you recruit and the system you train is going to affect what your passing is like. Somebody correct me, but, from what I can tell, UIC was the only one of 11 teams with a Passing Strength to be in a 6-2. At the NCAA (and HS/club) level, a 5-1 gives you more passing options and sub flexibility than a 6-2.

Okay, I’ll be back next week with the Passing Weakness profile, and in the meantime I’ll have a couple more related posts for Premium Subscribers. In particular, stay tuned because at the end of the month (May 26), I’ll be hosting a mini-Offensive Concepts webinar, where I break down some of the reception tactics I use as part of my offensive system. So if you can’t make it out to a live event, you’ll want to make sure you’re a Premium Subscriber, so you can get access to this webinar.

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

2. Stanford, Baylor, Northern Iowa, Oregon, and Houston

3. Which is kind of a made-up state that just compares the Good Pass Standard Deviation to the other 2 categories. In theory, a higher GP Index means a team is relatively more reliant on passing.

4. Aka “Sweet 16”