VBelo Scouting Report: February 21, 2023

The Carolina shuffle

Feb 21, 2023

Today we have three Conference Carolinas matches. As I was looking at some of the past matches, I had the sense that the conference may be going through a realignment. So, I decided to take a look at VBelo and see what might be happening. This is what I saw for 2023:

The beginning of the season was fairly predictable, but in the past month it looks like the model is picking up on some shifts in the landscape of this conference. At the beginning of the season the spread between second highest VBelo and the sixth was 228 VBelo points. As of today, that gap has shrunk just about in half to 115. There is a serious convergence here as some of the top teams are declining and the lower teams are rising.

Here is a zoom in on the action in February.

Some teams may just be in a rut and they will revert back to their mean, but I have a feeling we are seeing some significant changes in the Conference Carolinas. For some perspective, this is what the MPSF has looked like this year.

The lines are significantly flatter, except of course Grand Canyon who has been unstoppable…literally. Even though the conference looks different this year than last year, the trends looks to be holding pretty steady, unlike the Conference Carolinas. We will definitely know more in the next few weeks, but I won’t be surprised when the standings down in the Carolinas looks dramatically different than pre-season expectations.