VBelo Offseason: August 1, 2022
It’s been a few months since the 2022 season ended, but that doesn’t mean the action stopped. These past few weeks have been chalk full of major news drops across the Men’s Volleyball world. (Not to mention some great international matches at VNL.)
Even though there aren’t any matches, VBelo is still working on compiling more data to use for the model. Some exciting things in the works (which you can read about below.) If you have any ideas for data you want to see, let me know and I’ll see what I can do.
Potential Tournament Expansion
The most exciting news from July came last week from the NCAA. (Yes, that NCAA. And no, this isn’t a joke.) The NCAA Division I Competition Oversight Committee approved in principle the expansion of the National Collegiate Men’s Volleyball Championship from 7 teams to 12. There are two qualifiers to this. First, budget considerations need to be looked at and the official vote won’t happen until Spring 2023. And second, this would not start until the 2024 season.
This is a huge step in the right direction. The fact the the COC is talking about this and wants to expand the tournament shows the growing impact and value Men’s Volleyball has for the NCAA. Another exciting item for this expansion is that the SIAC (who had their inaugural season this past year) would get an automatic qualifier to the tournament. This would create 6 automatic bids (by conference) and 6 at-large bids. I can think of a handful of teams that would have loved this the past few seasons. (This one’s for you, Penn State.)
Other items from the Men’s Volleyball section of the agenda included officially approving the 5 automatic qualifiers for the 2023 tournament. Apparently, that needed to be voted on for this upcoming season. The other item was a tabled decision on using KPI as part of the selection criteria for the national tournament. The committee is waiting for results from how field hockey was able to use KPI before they agree to include it for Men’s Volleyball, however. I don’t know if KPI is the solution, but using more (and better) metrics for the selection committee would be amazing.
Dreaming Big
Even though 12 teams is a huge win for the sport and great for growing the game, that doesn’t stop me from dreaming even bigger. So, here is my unofficial (and terribly unrealistic pitch) for a 12-team DOUBLE ELIMINATION tournament. How amazing would that be???
I know it doesn’t work this way (for so many reasons) but here is a fun look at what a tournament could look like. Here is a 12 team, double elimination bracket seeded based on the final AVCA coaches poll before the tournament. Just looking at this gets me excited. (My apologies to Conference Carolinas, but really the issue is the coaches undervaluing them in the polls.)
It may never happen on the national stage, but a guy can dream.
On the Move
There have been a TON of movement on the women’s side this summer, but the Men’s transfer portal has been significantly quieter. That being said, the major “transfer”1 news came in early July out of Long Beach…
Alex Nikolov
On July 8th, Alex Nikolov, reigning National Player of the Year and the only freshman to win the award, announced that he would be forgoing the rest of his time at Long Beach to play professionally. In his one season in the NCAA, Nikolov started all 27 matches for the Beach and played in all 101 sets. He averaged 4.63 kills/set (3rd best in NCAA) with a .386 hitting percentage. He also added 0.58 aces/set (2nd best in NCCA) and 0.6 blocks/set. This is a huge blow for the national championship runner-ups as they look to fill a First-Team All American hole on the outside for 2023 and beyond.
Nikolov signed a 3-year contract with Cucine Lube Civitanova (Volley Lube) in Serie A of the Italian Volleyball League. They are currently the two time defending champions of the Italian Championship. Last season, in addition to the SuperLega trophy, Volley Lube had the league’s Most Valuable Player and Best Middle Blocker in Robertlandy Simón and Best Server in BYU alumnus and recent USA National Team addition Gabi Garcia Fernandez. So yeah, this team is stacked.
Other Moves
Tracking transfers is pretty difficult in Men’s Volleyball at this point in the offseason. These moves are based on incoming transfers to D-I/II teams that have press releases. If you know of other transfers, please let me know!
Alex Cabana (MB/OPP)
To: The Ohio State University
From: Life University (NAIA)
Troy Gooch (L)
To: UCLA
From: Purdue Fort Wayne
Will Migdal (OPP)
To: NJIT
From: Concordia University Irvine
Sina Sinbari (OH)
To: Fairleigh Dickinson University
From: University of Charleston
Jack Walmer (S)
To: UC Santa Barbara
From: University of Hawai’i
Sam Warren (OH)
To: UC San Diego
From: Orange Coast College (CCCAA)
Zachary Weston (MB)
To: UC San Diego
From: Orange Coast College (CCCAA)
Ethan Young (OH)
To: Fairleigh Dickinson University
From: UC Santa Barbara
If you have any transfer news, feel free to let VBelo know!
In the Works
Now to some fun stuff. One of the big off season questions that every team has is “how will personnel changes affect us next season?” This is what every coach is trying to figure out (unless their roster is miraculously completely unchanged.) VBelo has started to dive into the numbers to see what we might be able to expect from teams next year. There is still a lot of work (and data) to go, but here is a sneak peek of some work in progress.2
Big West
The 2022 championship match was a Big West showdown, so let’s take a look at how much experience this conference might be losing. For this rough calculation, we are only looking at sets and matches played in the 2022 season. For the “experience” score for each player, sets are weighted higher than matches. A player who played in every set of every match would have an experience score of 100. So here is how the Big West looks from this view.
UCSD graduated a TON of experience from 2022. If a full-time player scores a 100, then losing 600 experience is roughly equivalent to losing 6 starters…which would be everyone on the court. This will be an interesting year as they look to rebuild.
Farther down, we see Long Beach losing about 150 experience. Nikolov makes up 100 of those points, but even that doesn’t begin to reflect the magnitude of his departure. Don’t worry, there is some very preliminary work being done to try and account for that in VBelo.
At the bottom, and apparently returning a huge number of players, is UCSB. From the transfer section above, we know they are losing Ethan Young (who played in one set for a total of 1.75 experience.) While no seniors were celebrated at senior night for UCSB, the transfer in of Jack Walmer and (strongly sourced yet unconfirmed3) reports that Patrick Paragas has graduated would provide the only substantial personnel loss for the Gauchos.
The next step is to use the experience lost numbers to weight how much each team’s elo score decreases for the start of next season. Exciting stuff ahead!
Hear me out. I know this isn’t a transfer in the sense that he entered the NCAA transfer portal and changed universities. Technically, Nikolov will be playing for a different team next year and he did not graduate, so I am calling it a transfer. An international transfer by way of turning pro.
This is very much a work in progress. The composition of the metrics will likely change, but it is still interesting to see this work in the early phases.
According to Paragas’s LinkedIn, he ended his employment as a student athlete in June of 2022 and began working in the finance sector full-time in July.