You may be familiar with our regularly occurring Where Are We Now series here at Anonymous Eagle. It pops up when 1) I have the time to stretch my legs and get it done 2) heading into Big East play for Marquette 3) when I have access to some kind of national rankings that helps tell the story. Unfortunately for you, I don’t have the time to stretch my legs all the way out for volleyball this season. If the NCAA had debuted the RPI on Monday, maybe I could do it because I wouldn’t have to do the pen and paper version of Best Win/Worst Loss and could instead just read the team sheets. They didn’t debut the RPI, so all I have to go on is Evollve, and while I really like Evollve, they don’t automatically list the rankings for everyone’s schedule.
That had me leaning towards just skipping the WAWN entry this year, but then I realized something: This is Big East volleyball. I don’t need to do the deep dive. Most of the teams in this league are not actually trying to be good at volleyball and going through several teams that are just participating would be no fun for anyone.
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So. Instead, I’m going to do an abbreviated version of Where Are We Now. This is the simple version: Who is on track for the NCAA tournament by way of their Evollve ranking as of the morning of Tuesday, September 23, and who is Just Doing Things.
The National Rankings Contender
#6 — Creighton
I was tempted to call this “The National Championship Contender” because anyone in the top 10 should be a contender, right? However, the Bluejays are outside the top 15 in the newest AVCA top 25 poll — although just barely at #16 — and they already have losses to the teams currently ranked #1, #3, and #7 in the Evollve rankings, not to mention #13 and #23. They’ve played an NCAA tournament’s worth of challengers already this year and came away with five losses that say that they’re maaaaaybe not quite a title contender, merely a team that deserves to stay in the top 25 all year.
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The NCAA Tournament Contender
#54 — Marquette
This is where Evollve falls down ever so slightly for me because I would like to see exactly how Marquette is impacted by their loss to #96 Ball State. Good news: That’s not a huge disaster of a loss because the Cardinals are in the top 100. However, I think we can presume that Marquette would be, I dunno, 10? or so spots further up the rankings if they had come away with that victory. As long as MU doesn’t step into a problem during Big East play — and if vs Florida/vs Minnesota Marquette shows up the rest of the year, they won’t — then I think they glide easily into the NCAA tournament.
The Quality Wins
#73 — Villanova
#75 — Connecticut
I said or at the very least implied a lot of very mean things about the non-Creighton/Marquette teams up top. Villanova and UConn are undeserving of scorn here. They’re top 75 teams in the Evollve rankings, and honestly, as long as you’re not in triple digits, you’re fine. As will become very clear in a second, these two should be the two teams that make it to Milwaukee as the other half of the Big East tournament, as the conference has cut the field back down to just four teams this year. If they aren’t the two teams that join Marquette and Creighton, something has gone horribly wrong for them.
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The Beginning Of The Problem
#122 — Xavier
#144 — DePaul
Without doing the full schedule breakdown, you can quickly identify exactly how horrible Xavier’s non-conference schedule is with this one fact: They’re 11-1 right now. They have a grand total of one Power 4 team on the slate to this point of the year and they lost that match. Credit where credit is due: Cincinnati’s at #58, so they’re roughly in contention for the NCAA field, but that’s also Xavier’s only real challenge. DePaul hasn’t challenged themselves at all on their way to taking four losses already, which is how they’re drifting towards the midway point of the Evollve ranking of all 348 teams in Division 1.
If this was the back end of the Big East, we’d all say “y’know, that’s not helpful to building strength of schedule for everyone else,” but that would be about the extent of it. However, y’all can do math and realize we’re only halfway through the league right now.
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Objectively Bad Teams
#214 — Providence
#217 — Butler
#223 — St. John’s
#225 — Georgetown
#239 — Seton Hall
I’m going to rattle off some fact here to just to drive home how bad this is. Here’s the worst teams in the Power 4 conferences at the moment:
ACC: #202 Virginia Tech
SEC: #90 Alabama
Big 12: #161 Texas Tech
Big Ten: #127 Rutgers
See the problem here?
Here’s the full list of Power 4 teams that these five teams have played this season:
Iowa, Purdue, Auburn, Louisville, West Virginia, Tennessee, Syracuse, Virginia, Clemson, and Maryland.
St. John’s is shouldering a burden there with five of those games. Those are all losses, and they have combined to win just five sets in those matches.
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Here is the full list of non-Power 4 teams that this five-pack has lost to already this year:
North Texas, Little Rock, Bryant, Tulane, Illinois State, Montana, Eastern Illinois, IU Indy, Morehead State, Utah Valley, San Jose State, Hawaii, American, George Mason, George Washington, Temple, Belmont, Lipscomb, NJIT, and Washington State.
You come up empty when you test yourself? That’s bad luck. Five teams combine to go 0-20 against teams from leagues that the Big East ostensibly would like to say that they are better than, one way or another? Bad times, man, even if there are a couple of teams in there — hello, Illinois State & Hawaii! — that can think of themselves as regular NCAA tournament contenders.
Now there’s five teams in the conference that are going to have bad RPI numbers when those are officially launched, and then because those five will play each other, they’re just going to reinforce how bad the RPI numbers are. The end result there is dragging down everyone’s RPI when they play them. That’s not a hypothetical. Last year, Marquette’s RPI went from #22 to #24 because they beat #211 Georgetown and #194 Seton Hall in the same week.
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Is going from 22 to 24 going to cost you a spot in the NCAA tournament? Of course not. But slipping two, three, four, five spots because your conference schedule required you to play five awful teams could be the difference in hosting the first two rounds of the tourney, or it could be the difference in getting an at-large bid and not.
Think about this: I’m being cranky about this from a Marquette perspective, coming on the heels of Marquette being a perennial NCAA tournament team for more than a decade. Imagine how Villanova and Connecticut feel right now, knowing that Big East play is just going to yank them further down the rankings, further and further away from at-large consideration.
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