Week 13 Preview (Weekend), And A Little Rant

This is the last weekend of the regular season, and although there are a couple other tournaments that may affect the tournament bubble, the focus is on the power conferences, their matchups, and the jockeying for seeding and titles.

• The premier conference in women’s college volleyball, the Pac-10, has four final matchups between teams in the AVCA Top 25, and a two-way tie for the conference title.  Washington, #4 in the poll, swept Oregon St. last night to forge a tie with Stanford for the lead.  They will end their regular season Friday night facing 18th-ranked Oregon at home.  Washington has won the last 17 matches against the Ducks.  They serve it up beginning at 9 CST.  I thank the University of Washington for offering the game up to watch online for free.
• Meanwhile, Stanford (6th in the poll), who have been chasing the Huskies all season, finish their year with the back half of the Big Spike.  The first half was their conference opener, and at Cal, they dropped a five-setter in front of a record-breaking crowd in Berkeley.  If the Cardinal defeat the Bears (12), they will at least share the title with Washington.  And since the two teams won their matchup at home, I don’t know who get the conference’s automatic bid.  The Big Spike is Friday night at 9; track here.
• One final gauntlet run in the Pac-10, and that falls on Arizona, who have to travel to Los Angeles.  The 19th-ranked Wildcats face UCLA (9) Friday afternoon at 5 (watch), then go up against USC (16) Saturday afternoon at 4 (track).
• By the way, all the ranked teams, all seven of them, should be able to make the postseason.  The bubble teams in the Pac-10 are Washington St. and Oregon St., and both teams lost to Oregon and Washington, respectively, Thanksgiving Eve, so they may be in big trouble.
• In case you don’t know, Penn St. has got the Big Ten as soon as they started playing the season.  They’ve won 94 straight matches, their seventh consecutive conference title, and will, with wins over Michigan St. and #12 Michigan, run the Big Ten table for the third year in a row.  The #1 Lady Lions play both squads at home.  The game against the Wolverines starts at 6 on Saturday; you can listen to the audio feed here.
• The other two ranked teams in the Big Ten will also square off in their last game of the season.  It’ll be Senior Night in Minneapolis as 13th-ranked Minnesota hosts #5 Illinois Saturday night at 7.  No free stream and I don’t think there’s a place you can track the match, but you can listen to it if you sign up here on the Gophers’ website.
• From my estimation, the bubble teams in the Big 10 are Northwestern, Purdue and Wisconsin.  The Wildcats have already lost to Illinois on Wednesday and must play at Minnesota Friday to finish their year.  The Boilermakers finish this weekend at Iowa and at Wisconsin, the Badgers’ last game of the regular season.
• Texas, right behind Penn St. in every single weekly poll this year, won the Big 12 title outright with their sweep of Oklahoma Wednesday.  The fight comes from the Sooners, Kansas and Missouri.  Unfortunately, their last games, all on Saturday, are on the road.  Worst of all, the Jayhawks must face the wrath of Senior Night at Texas.  Oklahoma has to go to uprising Iowa St.  At least the Tigers get unranked (though pretty good) Texas A&M.
• Finally, there is at least things going on in Women’s College Volleyball Nation right now: The Missouri Valley Conference Championship.  The first game of the conference tournament just kicked off live at Omaha, Neb. at 6 o’clock; details on the tourney here.  While Northern Iowa (20) is the number-one seed and an almost-lock for the NCAA regardless, scrutinize the 2-seed, Missouri St., and even 3-seed (and once-ranked team) Wichita St.  Both teams are on the bubble — though it’s debatable with the Shockers — so a win or two or three would help their postseason hopes a lot.

Finally, onto my rant.  If you look at Bo Rottenborn’s NCAA women’s volleyblog, you can see that of the 31 conferences in the sport, nine of them do not have end-of-season conference tournaments.  Of those, five of them are five of the BCS Six; the Big East has a conference tourney, won by Louisville.  Two of the remaining four are the West Coast and Big West Conferences, both of whom have some history of success with women’s volleyball, seeing that the sport has been dominated by Left Coast teams.  One of the leagues that doesn’t have a postseason tournament is the Ivy League, which doesn’t have them in any sport.  The only conference I don’t have an explanation for is the Mountain West.

Explanation for what, exactly?  The need for a postseason tournament.  Actually, when you look at it, a team’s fitness for the NCAA Tourney should be based only on what they did playing in the league, and no postseason conference set-up should skew those results.  But I’m sort of pleased that conferences known to churn out the best programs in women’s college volleyball don’t feel the need to make some or all the teams come together around Thanksgiving to play each other for potentially the third time in the year.  Tournament champions get the automatic bid, but power conferences will get multiple bids regardless; manipulating the ends of schedules just to goose the RPI rating of their best teams is overkill.  So I applaud these nine conferences for rewarding true conference achievement.

This also brings up another question: If five of the BCS Six don’t have tournaments in college volleyball, why do they (and all conferences except the Ivy) do it for college basketball?  It’s just as pointless for high-majors in that sport, yet they do it, which oftentimes only does nothing but get a marginal team an automatic bid and let coaches of teams that know they’re in regardless to rest their starters and play half-ass basketball (and don’t start with me on this; there is no good reason for tournament locks to play well in tourney games because they could get injured and miss the Big Dance, and they don’t play as hard).  So it’s the money, right?  The money they get from TV contracts is the reason they do it, otherwise the logistics and expense of renting and operating an arena that has to be less than full would not be worth it.  So why do it for women’s volleyball?  I love the sport, but there’s no money in it.  I can’t believe that any of the 22 conferences running a tournament are making enough money to justify it.  Why not just run a regular season without a tournament?

End of rant.  I can’t wait for Selection Sunday!