Triangles In The Tournament: Houston

What does it look like when you win two 5-set matches?

The NCAA women’s tournament is here! My Monday articles will focus on the big themes of scouting and gameplanning while I add some real-time content as the tournament unfolds.

Because of seeding, the first round of the tournament often sees some matches with big margins of victory. Texas, Marquette, Ohio State, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Florida, Pitt, Kentucky, and Louisville all have yet to drop a set.

But you know who has played some close matches. Houston! With two exciting 5-set victories, plus ESPN’s favorite rally of the tournament so far, they’ve been one of the best teams to follow.

So let’s take a look at the Triangle breakdown for Houston and see if there’s anything we can learn so far.

(Note: because I’m using Volleymetrics codes, there are often a couple points here or there that aren’t coded correctly. I think everything is close enough to draw some highlights from, but this isn’t 100% airtight code. For the 99% of you who didn’t care about that distinction, let’s proceed.)

Triangle Summary

Proportion Of Each Phase
17% Terminal Serves
42% First Ball
41% Transition

This is fairly typical for NCAA women’s volleyball. We’ll see a bunch of matches where teams are playing half of the match in First Ball, but in general we see that be about an even split. So about normal there. Let’s look at their +/- in each rotation.

Proportion Of Points Won
43% of Terminal Serves
54% of First Ball
52% of Transition

We talk about the idea of winning 2 out of 3 phases of the Triangle, and that’s what we see here. It would be surprising if a team that was 6-4 in sets with a 52% point differential¹ won all 3 phases of the Triangle.

In terms of the Team Profile, we’d call this a classic Terminal Serving Weakness profile. And reminder: that doesn’t mean you are necessarily bad in that phase (although Houston has not been especially great), but it means you are comparatively stronger in both of the other phases.

Last year, 3 of the teams that made the Sweet 16² including eventual champion Wisconsin profiled out as TS Weakness teams over the course of their regular season. So there's plenty of track record for winning that way.

Extending The Triangle

We’ve also talked about using Sideout By Pass Quality to extend our understanding of the Triangle results, especially in the First Ball phase. Let’s look at those numbers: