Volleyball Coaching Life-Selection Process for the NCAA Tournament

Everyone becomes expert prognosticators when it comes to guessing which teams will make it into the 64 teams selected for the 2023 NCAA tournament. I am but one of many.

Below is the selection process from what I can recall off the top of my head. Some of the knowledge was related to me quite a few years ago by someone who was the chair of the selection committee that particular year. The details may have changed over the years, but I believe the process is the same. I apologize for any errors.

The selection committee must follow a process to figure out the final 64, the process imposes significant constraints on the decisions.

·       Only 16 teams are seeded instead of all 64 teams. I had hoped that they would start seeding more teams after they seeded all 48 teams during COVID, but they didn’t.

·       The top 16 teams have the option to host the first two rounds, the finals are in Tampa Bay and the regional finals, the third and fourth rounds, had been selected at the time as the finals. The right to host is subject to the NCAA’s guidelines on hosting regarding the quality of the facilities etc. Lockers for all the teams, lockers for the officials, etc. A top 16 seed could choose to not host, but that is crazy talk or they had constraints that they couldn’t overcome.

·       There are 32 automatic qualifiers, conference champions who have won the right to represent their conferences. The top teams in the field who won their conference also counts as the automatic qualifier for the conference.

·       The other teams are considered at large bids.

The RPI is the starting basis of the discussions. RPI is very controversial, and it proven to be not indicative of the strength of the teams since it purely depends on numerical data and it is an average of numerous factors. From Wikipedia:

The rating percentage index, commonly known as the RPI, is a quantity used to rank sports teams based upon a team's wins and losses and its strength of schedule. It is one of the sports rating systems by which NCAA basketball, baseball, softball, hockey, soccer, lacrosse, and volleyball teams are ranked. This system was in use from 1981 through 2018 to aid in the selecting and seeding of teams appearing in the NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament as well as in the women's tournament from its inception in 1982 through 2020.

In its current formulation, the index comprises a team's winning percentage (25%), its opponents' winning percentage (50%), and the winning percentage of those opponents' opponents (25%). The opponents' winning percentage and the winning percentage of those opponents' opponents both comprise the strength of schedule (SOS). Thus, the SOS accounts for 75% of the RPI calculation and is 2/3 its opponents' winning percentage and 1/3 its opponents' opponents' winning percentages.

No opinions, no eye tests, strict numbers. Note that the AVCA coaches’ poll is not the starting point, nor is it ever used as reference. The committee does have access to the records of the NCAA regional coaches committee, these committees meet weekly during the season to discuss the teams in that region. This keeps the selection committee up to date on each of the top teams in the region during the season. This is one of the intangible factors that affects the discussions behind closed doors. These are coaches who volunteer their time to give important opinions on the top teams. Since this information does not affect the Coaches polls, they have little to gain personally.

The committee started the selection process Thanksgiving week, I would hazard to guess that they are meeting on Thanksgiving Day too, but I am not sure about that.

The first step is to break the field into four blocks of four. They take the first team on the list and compare their body of work to the second team’s body of work. The term body of work is important and often used in discussions because they are looking at the team’s accomplishment holistically, within the season.

The committee has available to them all the NCAA statistics as well as videos.

·       Head-to-head.

·       Record against top 50.

·       Record against top 25

·       Record against top 10.

·       Significant good wins, against teams ahead of them.

·       Significant bad losses, against teams below them.

·       Set scores, point differentials for good wins and bad losses are also available.

·       Lineups for any matches.

·       Record in the final ten matches of the season.

·       Parenthetically, PABLO was being considered to be used in the selection process, since PABLO was calculated based on predicting the outcome of a head-to-head meeting between two teams, I know the author of PABLO was adjusting the calculations to meet the selection committee’s requirement. I don’t know what became of the attempt to diversify the data set.

Note that the teams’ records that were already baked into the RPI are also included in the statistics used when the committee goes into debating the relative merits of their body of work. At the end of the debate, they decide whether to keep the same order or flip the order of the two teams. The same process goes through all the teams in the four-team block. Then they move to the next block of four, but they take the fifth team and compare their body of work with that of the fourth team, the last team on the first block, to decide on whether to keep the same order or flip. This goes on for all the 16 seeds. They will of course compare the body of work of the 17^th team on the RPI and compare them to the last seeded team.

Since they don’t seed all 64 teams, they remove the automatic qualifiers who are not seeded already but are automatically included in the field. They work on the lowest RPI ranked at-large teams to include in the tournament by using the same process. The numbers of the last teams to be considered are different every season. The reason has to do with the way the automatic qualifiers resolve itself and whether the regular season champion or another team won the conference tournament — if they played a conference tournament.  This is why the announcers draw attention to the RPI.

The committee goes deep into the at-large teams, hedging their bets and giving themselves a good selection of backups. This is where the last four in and out come from.

Some good things to keep in mind:

·       While the RPI is the basis of the initial ranking, there are many ways to improve upon where the team ends up in RPI. This is why many coaches opt to schedule tough, reasoning that the 75% of the RPI that is dependent on the Strength Of Schedule (SOS) — opponents’ winning percentage and its opponents' opponents' winning percentages. Teams that are in a weak conference gets hurt by their conference because those wins does nothing to their SOS.

·       There are indirect ways to move up from your RPI, having good upset wins and avoiding bad upset loses.

·       The team’s record in the last 10 matches can be critical for some teams, it inserts a hot team into the tournament, all else being equal, to introduce that potential upset factor.

·       The committee does not look at all the teams from a macro level. As with the NCAA basketball selection, many will fault the selection for some strong early matchups that would be better suited, i.e. more competitive, for the later rounds, but I have to believe that the committee would want to have those later round competitive matches if they had a preference. They are following the rules dictated by the NCAA’s.

The same meetings are held using the same process by the AVCA awards committee to decide on the COY, POY, and the AA teams. The AA teams are further broken down by positions.

This is my favorite part of the season, I hope it is yours too. Enjoy.