The Circle of (MVB) Life
December giveth and December taketh away, in the world of NCAA Men's Volleyball. Plus: 12-team expansion, Giving Tuesday, and why I'm refactored the Elo model.
The weather may be getting cooler, but men’s volleyball news is heating up. December 1st hit us with two massive news drops just when I thought we were going to float quietly into the new season.
For longtime readers, welcome back! For you first-timers, welcome! Here is the (4-4 deep court) starting lineup for today’s offseason edition.
Pacific rises from the ashes
Knipe hangs up the clipboard
The season ahead
Cleaning up the model
*whistle for first serve*
Pacific rises from the ashes
After a 13 year hiatus, the Pacific Tigers will return to the court in the spring of 2027. Thanks to financial backing from the USA Volleyball Foundation, volleyball fans are getting some sweet vindication. It’s not everyday that a team comes back after being cut, especially after more than a decade of silence.
According to Pacific, the plan is to compete in the MPSF. If nothing changes before the 2027 season, they would become the 11th team in the conference. While this raises logical questions about the structure of the conference and its end-of-season tournament, this is undeniably an exciting day for the growth of the sport.
The Tigers returning to competition boils down to one factor: money. USA Volleyball, First Point (now part of USAV), and East Coast Volleyball provided a sizable grant of $250,000. While that is a significant chunk of change, it will go quickly in this modern athletic landscape. Thankfully, alumni have already stepped up to pledge annual gifts to the program.
This type of sustained giving is the only way programs like Pacific will be able to get off the ground, and stay there. This newsletter is coming out on Giving Tuesday, which is a great reminder that every program in the country can use more funds. If you are a fan of a team, consider sending some money their way. If you want to help a smaller team out, do it! Every dollar counts in an era where budgets are tighter than a fifth set.
Knipe hangs up the clipboard
Just hours after the Pacific news dropped, the West Coast felt another earthquake. Longtime Long Beach State head coach Alan Knipe announced that he will be stepping down at the end of December, prior to the beginning of the 2026 season.
After 25 years at Long Beach—21 as head coach—Knipe will retire as the winningest coach in program history with a record of 450-172 (a 72.3% winning percentage). He is only the seventh head coach for the Beach, so needless to say, there are some massive shoes to fill.
To say that Knipe is going out on top is putting it mildly. He led Long Beach to the 2025 National Championship match, coached another AVCA Player of the Year in Moni Nikolov, and was inducted into the AVCA Hall of Fame. He has been instrumental in building Long Beach into the powerhouse that it is today, and that culture likely won’t change anytime soon.
While official news of a successor hasn’t dropped, it seems likely that longtime associate head coach Nick MacRae will take over duties, either in an interim or permanent capacity.
I would say “happy retirement,” but I wouldn’t be surprised if his next steps involve a different kind of court (looking at you, USA Volleyball). Either way, congrats on a stellar collegiate career, Coach.
The season ahead
I am planning to highlight the 2026 season in depth in the coming weeks. For now, I want to keep it at a high level.
The two biggest changes that will have lasting impacts on the men’s volleyball world are both related to expansion:
Tournament Expansion: This is still the biggest news of the offseason. Expanding the bracket to 12 teams is long overdue and is going to create a fantastic tournament environment.
Conference Expansion: The addition of a new conference, the Great Lakes Valley Conference (GLVC), is huge. Adding teams is vital to the growth of the sport, but lasting growth is only sustainable if it is supported at the conference level.
There is a positive feedback loop between the conferences and the national tournament: the more conferences that are granted automatic bids, the larger the tournament needs to be.
More to come on this season soon, so stay tuned.
Cleaning up the model
For you nerds out there, I wanted to give a quick update on the VBelo model, the idea that started this whole thing. For the first time since creating the model, I decided to dramatically refactor and clean up the code. Did I give myself enough time to do this before the season starts? To be determined.
I had two goals with this offseason cleaning:
Flexibility: I wanted to be able to tweak and test the model more easily. I’m not a professional software developer, and that becomes clear when I look back at my legacy code. I’ve started to make it more modular so that I can add, edit, or remove parts quickly. If everything goes well, this will also lead to an interesting new way to adjust team Elo ratings between seasons.
Accessibility: I wanted to make the code easy to understand. The current version is a jumble and includes a lot of old bits that aren’t used anymore. Multiple people have reached out over the years to see if they could use the code. I always want to share, but I know I haven’t created a package that is user-friendly. In an ideal world, anyone should be able to download the code from GitHub, turn modules on/off, and use it for their own analysis. It’s not there yet… but it is getting closer.
That’s all for now. Thanks to everyone who made it to the end of the newsletter, and I’m looking forward to journeying with you all this next season.