Very interesting as always, Joe. Like you, coaching club and high school, I have gone by the mantra “against known stronger teams, serve tough” ( and put up with errors); against comparable or weaker teams just FSI (first serve in) and play defense…sounds like what you are saying is that the latter approach is preferable no matter the level of the opponent
I think your mantra is exactly what I would still say. But... this one way of looking at the data does challenge that assertion and it's always good to challenge beliefs.
This stat is so interesting to me: "It’s also worth nothing that the correlation to Opponent Good Pass is only -0.05. In other words, how well or poorly your opponents passed had almost 0 correlation to winning."
I ended up going back and looking at our stats on the year after this to look for a correlation. We've lost 12 games this season (it's been a rough one, don't get me started), and we passed better than the other team in 8 of them. Mildly rocked my world since I would agree with your statement that it feels so bad to serve easy balls to good teams. If bad passing doesn't correlate to losing, why are we trying to serve SO tough all of the time? Especially if our average margin during a loss is 3.5 points. Food for thought.
I agree! I think part of it is that medium pass where the setter has to move to the 10' line, etc is often not nearly as bad as we think it is and perfect pass isn't nearly as good as we think it is.
Very interesting as always, Joe. Like you, coaching club and high school, I have gone by the mantra “against known stronger teams, serve tough” ( and put up with errors); against comparable or weaker teams just FSI (first serve in) and play defense…sounds like what you are saying is that the latter approach is preferable no matter the level of the opponent
I think your mantra is exactly what I would still say. But... this one way of looking at the data does challenge that assertion and it's always good to challenge beliefs.
This stat is so interesting to me: "It’s also worth nothing that the correlation to Opponent Good Pass is only -0.05. In other words, how well or poorly your opponents passed had almost 0 correlation to winning."
I ended up going back and looking at our stats on the year after this to look for a correlation. We've lost 12 games this season (it's been a rough one, don't get me started), and we passed better than the other team in 8 of them. Mildly rocked my world since I would agree with your statement that it feels so bad to serve easy balls to good teams. If bad passing doesn't correlate to losing, why are we trying to serve SO tough all of the time? Especially if our average margin during a loss is 3.5 points. Food for thought.
I agree! I think part of it is that medium pass where the setter has to move to the 10' line, etc is often not nearly as bad as we think it is and perfect pass isn't nearly as good as we think it is.