NCAA DI Volleyball Tournament Thoughts
As a man without a team this fall, I found myself much more interested in the 2025 NCAA Division I Women’s Indoor Volleyball selection special than I had been in past years, even when my team was selected. I’ve been able to pay attention to a wider range of teams instead of just the one I was working for. I wanted to share some thoughts about factors I think affected which teams were selected and how they match up against one another.
The largest takeaway is that RPI continues to be king. If you’re a Villanova fan, I’m sorry that your team was this year’s exception to the rule. I like Josh Steinbach as a human and as a coach so I was disappointed ‘Nova wasn’t selected. While there were teams above them with similar records against RPI top 25 and top 50 teams, they really didn’t have any impressive wins, while having some questionable losses. But, let’s face it, when you get down to the bubble teams, there are ways to make the case either for or against any team. Their results are always going to be a mix of good and bad so the committee members can easily talk each other into or out of selecting a team.
But, as I said, RPI is king. If you run down the RPI rankings, you’ll see what I mean. The top 15 teams are all seeded and hosting, with the last hosting team being RPI #18 Indiana. (Sorry, BYU. Not sorry, UTEP.) The remaining seeded teams are all between RPI #16 and RPI #32 (Sorry, Utah State. You’re welcome, UCLA.)
Most years, you can set a “cut line” using RPI and this year was no exception. Before the bracket was announced, I had guessed the line would be at #42 and, looking at who was chosen and who was not, I’d say that’s where it ended up. The committee skipped Villanova, trading them for North Carolina. They had one pick left and, rather than take Pepperdine or Texas State, they opted for Michigan. While Michigan’s top 25 and top 50 records were similar to the teams that were passed over, their KPI was significantly better (KPI is one of the committee’s selection criteria). I’m not taking a stand on who should or should not have been included, I’m just saying what I think the justification likely would be from the committee.
The table below summarizes a few pieces of data about the selected teams I think are useful for understanding what comes next: the actual matches. While I’m including the seeds, I’m not taking any kind of stand on if the seeds are accurate reflections of how good teams are relative to one another. Once you get outside the top 10-15 teams, I think the committee has other considerations that become more important than a true seeding, so I won’t hold that against them. The teams are sorted by their RPI but the columns are sortable so feel free to re-sort teams to see what happens.
I used three pieces of information to create the table: seed, RPI, and Pablo rankings. While only the top 32 teams are seeded (in order to give the committee flexibility of placing lower teams in more travel-friendly and conference-avoiding matchups), I just gave the lower 32 teams seeds based on the actually-seeded teams they will play. The RPI rankings anchor everything, since this is the primary metric the committee is using to assess team strength. Pablo rankings, if you’re not familiar with them, can be found on richkern.com and I highly recommend subscribing to the site if you’re interested in assessing college volleyball teams based on wins and losses. Pablo rankings tend to be more accurate measurements of teams’ chances to win matches.
Why did I choose to include the three pieces of data shown above? Because I think they give you a fairly simple way of comparing teams and guessing which teams might be over-seeded or under-seeded and which matches could be most interesting or most likely to generate upsets. Look for teams that have large discrepancies in their seed relative to their RPI and/or their Pablo rankings. For instance, SMU and Texas A&M both have Pablo rankings that suggest they may be stronger than the other teams with similar seeds. That may be interesting when regional semifinals and finals are played.
One team that stands out from this table is UTEP. It seems they had a great year, at least as far as RPI is concerned, but they lost in the first round of their conference tournament. The committee seems to have recognized that and given them a lower seed, something a bit more in line with their Pablo ranking. Xavier is very similar: an RPI that is higher than their seed or their Pablo. I think it is rather telling that the committee matched them up against the two teams they selected from below the RPI cut line, Michigan and North Carolina. It’s almost like the committee is trying to punish UTEP and Xavier for trying to game the RPI system.
There is one obvious potential gift from the committee in the first round: Florida facing Rice. Florida wasn’t consistent enough to warrant a seed, while Rice had a decent RPI but didn’t secure their conference’s automatic bid, which hurt them. Still, Florida is a fairly strong team, one of three dangerous unseeded teams, along with Kansas State and North Carolina. I don’t think anyone would have been happy having to face Florida in the first round, but Rice has to be particularly worried.
I’m sure there are some other fun insights and predictions that can be drawn from this fairly elementary data so I hope you play around with it yourself. I’d love it if you left some of your observations in the comments.