VBelo Preseason Report: NEC
Rookie year but not rookie teams
Welcome to the VBelo Preseason Report for the Northeast Conference (NEC)! In this 8-part series, we will look at the state of Men’s Volleyball as we begin the 2023 NCAA season. Each conference profile will give a quick overview of how those teams look as they head into their 2023 campaign.
If you want to see the other conference profiles, I will update links as they are released:
Preseason Ranking
Disclaimer
VBelo only knows the information that is fed into it. Since there have been zero matches in 2023 so far, it doesn’t have a complete picture of teams yet. The best it can do is see where a team finished last season and adjust for players lost in the offseason. The model will learn more about these teams the same way we all will: seeing who wins matches. While these preseasons rankings don’t foretell where the teams will end the season (it can’t predict the future), it shows us where VBelo thinks they are starting from relative to the rest of the nation.
So let’s get to it! Here is how the NEC teams stack up to begin their inaugural season.
I feel fairly confident that many people would not have this same order. I say that because the preseason poll for the NEC has some important differences.
VBelo and the coaches seem to agree that SFU is a top contender in the conference. But, it looks like people might be underestimating the Daemen Wildcats. This team is 26-6 in the last two seasons! Interestingly, both rankings have the same teams in the top 4 and the bottom 4. When you look at the VBelo preseason ratings, this makes sense as the bottom 4 teams are all pretty closely bunched together.
I should probably mention that Merrimack is a bit of a wildcard here. It is the only first year program in this conference and because it has not played an official match, VBelo knows next to nothing about it. The model does make some assumptions1 about the strength of new teams but the first few matches will really start to align Merrimack with their true VBelo rating.
Roster Retention
To help make sense of the Roster Retention scores above, here is a deep dive into how this metric is calculated.2
At first glance, this conference is returning a lot of experience. Only 1 team (Long Island) has a retention metric above the average (0.38) which is pretty impressive. FDU only lost 1 player in the offseason so they come into this season with an incredible 0.06 retention metric to lead the conference.
Second year program LIU lost the most experience in the conference, so it will be interesting to see how this affects the team to begin the season. Overall, it is not super surprising that the NEC has lower than average roster loss. Of the 8 teams, 3 of them have been around for less than 4 years. This means that in the next year or two, these programs will start to graduate more players and their retention score will revert to the mean.
Watchlist
Here are some interesting story lines and things to watch for this season:
Inaugural Championship - Having a new conference means a brand new postseason tournament to be won. Who will hoist the first trophy?
Merrimack - As a first year program, VBelo (and everyone) will be keen to learn how this team performs. It is definitely in the hands of a coach who knows how to start a program strong.
SFU - The Red Flash open their season with quite the flash3 by travelling to Stanford and Hawai’i! Not only is this great scheduling, it will be interesting to see how a top NEC team does against some of the nation's best in January.
What will the conversation around the NEC and the future possibility of a national tournament auto-bid look like? We are still a few years away from this, but the sooner they are included, the better.
Conclusion
I don’t think I can fully put into words how excited I am for the NEC this season. For starters, this is clear evidence that the efforts to #GrowTheGame are working. Also, from a nerdy standpoint, this is a great experiment for VBelo. Part of the point of having elo ratings is to be able to compare teams that have not actually played each other. By supporting Men’s Volleyball, the NEC has taken teams from multiple conferences and various years of existence and put them together. This is what math dreams are made of!
While the odds of seeing one of these schools in the national tournament are exceedingly slim (WHICH IS A SHAME!), I am confident that the programs in the NEC will increase the overall competition in the sport. The NCAA will not be able to keep this conference out of the national tournament for long.
This would probably be a good discussion for another post, but essentially their rating is partially based on the winning percentage D-I/II teams have against D-III and NAIA teams. There is more to it than that, but hopefully that whets your math appetite.
Important note: If a player redshirted last year and left, they won’t show up in this calculation.
Sorry, not sorry.