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Poll Takeaways: Fifteen Coaches Put Pittsburgh First 📈
Nebraska holds the other forty-eight and keeps the top line. Neither team lost anything last week and six coaches changed their answer anyway.
Fifteen of the sixty-three ballots that carried a first-place vote put Pittsburgh top on Monday. Nine of them did it a week ago, and in between the Panthers and Nebraska both won everything they played.
Nebraska keeps first place and the other forty-eight. On each of the last two ballots those two teams have held all sixty-three between them, and every first-place vote cast in a fortnight has gone to one of the pair.
NCAA.com published the full table on Tuesday, a day and a half after the poll came out, and it puts Nebraska on 1,560 points to Pittsburgh's 1,527. Nobody else in the top five was named first on any ballot.
Six coaches changed their minds without either team handing them a defeat to change it over, and that is the whole of the news.
Pittsburgh Won Four, Nebraska Won Three
Pittsburgh played four times in five days and won twelve sets to none, beating No. 17 Tennessee, Jacksonville, High Point and Wright State. The last of those finished 3-0 (25-10, 25-14, 25-14).
Nebraska played three times in three days and won nine sets to one, beating New Mexico, Baylor and Georgia Tech. The last of those finished 3-1 (24-26, 25-17, 25-18, 25-12).
The set Nebraska lost was the first one, and it lost it to the team sitting closest to the rankings without being inside them.
Georgia Tech leads the others-receiving-votes line on eighty-three points, ahead of UCLA on forty-six, and is the only side outside the top twenty-five with a three-figure claim on anybody's ballot.
Four sweeps in five days reads like a coast. The match Pittsburgh's leading hitter goes back to is the one her team won from a long way behind.
Olivia Babcock, the Pittsburgh senior who hit .765 against Wright State on Sunday, told Abby Schnable of pittsburghpanthers.com that the week's value was in learning to flip the switch mid-match, and that against High Point the coaching staff could not do it for them.
It gives us a lot of value in learning how to flip the switch in the game. Especially against High Point, we were behind by a lot, and we just had to grind it out because we knew the coaches couldn't do it for us. They're not on the court, so we have to find solutions within the people on the court.
None of that is on a ballot and the ballot moved anyway. What a voter could count was ten wins against seven, because Pittsburgh has played three more matches than Nebraska has.
One of the three is the Missouri match at Wrigley Field, suspended after eighteen points on 6 September and rescheduled this week for 23 September in Lincoln, to be restarted from 0-0. Nebraska is 7-0 in a month in which Pittsburgh has got to 10-0.
Who You Lose To Is Most of the Punishment
Three ranked teams lost last week to unranked opponents and all three were marked down for it. Arizona State lost to UC Davis and fell five places. Creighton lost to Rice and fell five.
North Carolina lost to Vanderbilt and fell seven, from eighteenth to twenty-fifth. No team on the board fell further than that this week.
Wisconsin lost as well. It lost to No. 7 Texas, at the Moody Center in front of 10,294, and the coaches left it exactly where it was at sixth.
Stanford lost to a ranked side too and still fell four, from fourth to eighth, so the shelter is real without being complete. The three unranked defeats cost five, five and seven.
Three Matches Moved Both Teams in Them
Vanderbilt beat North Carolina at the Hammerstein Ballroom in Manhattan on Sunday for the first ranked win in the program's history, and both halves of that match turn up in Monday's voting.
North Carolina took the seven-place fall. Vanderbilt arrived among the teams receiving votes on twenty points, having been on nobody's ballot a week earlier.
The weekend's one tournament final went the other way. Purdue beat SMU in Nassau for the Paradise Invitational title, and SMU climbed three places to fifth while Purdue climbed three to eleventh.
SMU now sits six places above the team that swept it. It had beaten No. 3 Kentucky in the same tournament two nights before that final, and the ballot has that result in it as well.
Penn State swept Stanford at The Palestra and the coaches moved the two of them four places each in opposite directions, Stanford from fourth to eighth and Penn State from twelfth to ninth.
Only One of Them Plays This Week
Nebraska meets Creighton on Wednesday night at a sold-out Pinnacle Bank Arena. Creighton came into Monday twentieth and is the only other ranked team in the state.
Pittsburgh finished non-conference play on Sunday at 10-0 and does not play again until 25 September, when California visit Victory Heights Arena. Pittsburgh has played there three times and won three times.
The next ballot therefore gets settled in a building only one of these two is standing in, and the other spends nine days doing nothing and finds out on Monday whether that was enough.
Creighton takes a set off Nebraska on Wednesday and Pittsburgh gains more first-place votes next Monday than the six it gained this one, without touching a ball.
