I’m not a huge fan of using pass ratings – I don’t believe they accurately value different reception qualities. That being said, every single person ever uses pass ratings, so I decided to dive into it a little. In the above chart, pass ratings are valued on a 3 point scale (R# 3, + 2.5, ! 2, – 1, / 0.5, = 0). Set data was only collected from the top 9 Big Ten teams in 2016 in matches in which they played one another (“big matches”). The average pass rating for the team in each set they played is compiled in these distributions – with WON sets in teal and LOST sets in red.
What you’ll notice is that for some teams in these big matches, their pass rating in the set really has no bearing on winning the set. Wisconsin is a pretty good example of this as their distributions basically overlap one another completely. To be fair, this may be an anomaly due to Carlini’s ability to turn 1’s into 2’s and 2’s into 3’s (by the transitive Carlini property, 1 passes equal 3 passes, boom!).
On a similar note, Michigan and Michigan State suffer from this same phenomenon in that if you handed Rosen or George their team’s pass rating for any given set, they would essentially be guessing whether they won or lost the set. On the other hand, if you looked at Minnesota or Nebraska, you’d have a much better chance of guessing correctly, given the pass rating in the set.
Above are the descending correlations between set pass rating and set won/lost. Again, these are only in “big matches” which may skew the results – yet at the end of the day, Hugh/John/Russ etc. are game-planning to beat the best. But what you’ll see is that for some teams, the statistic of pass rating is relevant to winning and losing sets. For others, there’s likely something else driving winning. My goal is to continue to poke around to find the unique fingerprint for each team and what drives or hinders their success.
Rethinking Volley 