I just saw this blog post on the Volleymetrics website comparing the three men's volleyball conferences in the NCAA. For years the MPSF teams have won almost every national championship. The at large team in the tournament has usually been an MPSF team. The rankings are typically skewed in the MPSF's favor. Volleymetrics took a shot at answering which team is objectively better.
They developed a rating on a 0-10 scale for each of the basic skills of volleyball with the exception of setting (serve, pass, set, attack, block, and dig). These were then weighted and an overall score was produced. They did all of this with data without team names to avoid bias.
The data they came up with puts the MPSF as the strongest, followed closely by MIVA. The overall scores are pretty close between the MPSF and MIVA. It is also interesting to look at the conference scores for the different skills. Passing and attack ratings are very close between the three. The MIVA and EIVA have much higher ratings than the MPSF in serving. The MPSF is much higher in blocking than both, and they have a pretty good edge in digs over the MIVA (who have about that same difference over the EIVA).
It's an interesting set of data that I'll have to look at some more. I really wish there was a lot more discussion of the methodology. I would really like to see how the skills are weighted. I would assume digging is weighted higher than blocking and both are weighted higher than serving based on my reading of the data. I would also love to see how the 0-10 ratings were produced for each of the skills.
For a real interesting discussion, I would really like to see this done for women's volleyball teams. Were the Big 10 and PAC 12 really that good in women's volleyball , or did they get a lot of tournament seeds (9 and 7 teams respectively) based on much more subjective criteria?
No comments:
Post a Comment