VBelo Scouting Report: February 06, 2023
VBelo Scouting Report: February 06, 2023
Updated VBelo Ratings!
It has been a month of great volleyball, so let’s take a look at the current VBelo rankings. If you didn’t scroll straight down to the rankings, let me say that this ranking probably looks odd. It is missing some really good teams from the AVCA Coaches’ poll. One of the interesting things about elo ratings is that it takes time to move up and down by significant margins. I will talk more about specific teams, but without further ado, here is the VBelo rating for the top 15 teams.
Let’s start with the obvious. There are 4 teams that stand out from the rest: Hawai’i, Penn State, UCLA, & Long Beach. This is pretty much in line with the coaches and the media.1 When you graph the VBelo ratings of the top 15 teams, these top four stand out even more.
This graph also shows something else interesting: teams 7 through 11 are tightly grouped (right now). A big win (or loss) could create a lot of movement really quickly. Also, looking at the records of the teams, there is a significant drop off around #9 (except for Purdue Fort Wayne). These teams are struggling to keep their place in the VBelo rankings and in the case of Santa Barbara, are struggling to stay in the top 15 at all. Purdue Fort Wayne is just the opposite as the have actually increased their elo since the pre-season rankings and are showing significant gains on the season.
Before we look back at the pre-season rankings, I want to point out one more thing. Seven of the eight conferences are represented in this list. Most people would probably disagree with this particular list, but I honestly think that several conferences are underestimated largely because they aren’t a “historically strong” conference. VBelo could care less about which conference you belong in. If this list just mirrored the coaches or media poll, then this ranking would be useless. Instead, we have a list of top teams around the country that come from a much wider range of conferences. Looking at the top 15 teams, here is the breakdown by conference:
MIVA - 5
Big West - 3
MPSF - 3
CC - 1
EIVA - 1
IVA - 1
NEC - 1
Okay, let’s look back at the pre-season rankings.
Grand Canyon’s perfect start has launched them from off the rankings to #7 which is huge (more on that below). Pepperdine has also seen its stock rise significantly in the first month of the season from #11 to #6, even with two losses. The two teams that seem to be in free fall are UC Santa Barbara and Lincoln Memorial. This is not to say they are bad teams, but that VBelo has adjusted their rating down fairly significantly in the past month. But let’s focus on the big winners so far. And really, there is a clear answer as to who the biggest winner is and they aren’t even on the pre-season ranking or today’s (and that is a shame!) Let’s give it up for the Charleston Golden Eagles out of the EIVA!
This is every team that has gained VBelo this season so far. Charleston looks to be an outlier in an otherwise fairly regular distribution. Looking at the top end of this graph, the names aren’t that surprising: GCU, BYU, UCI, Stanford, Pepperdine. These are all teams that we thought could be good this year, but now they are really proving it. And then you have UCLA who we knew would be good and yet they seem to be even better than we might have thought!
Okay, that was a ton of information and several graphs all at once. I would love to hear from you to see what you see in these charts. Let me know down in the comments and let’s get some conversations started.
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Full disclosure, I am a voter in the Off The Block media poll.