3/13/25
If someone is asked to pick a complete set of 63 D3 men’s volleyball matches without knowing anything about volleyball, the laws of probability would indicate that they would pick roughly 32 of them correct, or 31.5 to be exact. Maybe a smart person would pick all the home teams and yield a slightly better result at 35 or 36. If you are a fan of D3 volleyball and follow the matches and conference matchups from week to week, you would probably yield a score of 42-44. If you are a coach at the D3 level or a really avid fan that gets immersed in understanding the D3 dynamic for all matches, our guess is that you could get as high as 48 or 50. For a website such as ours that uses math and algorithms to measure team strength, there is enough data presented thus far for the year that should at minimum yield an 80% confidence level and win rate, which for this example would result in 50.4 winners.
InsideHitter.com has consistently been able to achieve an 85%-win rate or better over the years that we have had our ranking algorithm in place. One season we reached 93%. In this example, the 85% level would represent picking 53.5 out of 63 matches. Despite this Saturday’s schedule showing 16 matches with the rating spread less than 1.5 points, we will put the algorithm on the line in public view and invite our volleyball fans to join us at home and try to pick the winning team for the full slate of Saturday matches. We will shoot for 57 out of 63. Anything less will be a disappointment. But with any risk-oriented adventure there is always a chance of a complete crash and burn. We also have 5 matches on the schedule with non D3 teams participating which brings more statistical risk.
We will have to wait and see what happens… until Saturday!
Here are our picks with detailed set score predictions…
