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Kentucky Too Low at No. 3? 🤔
The two teams ranked above Kentucky have not played a set between them. Kentucky just swept a Final Four team on .380 hitting. The case each way.
Nebraska has not played a match yet. Texas has not played a match yet. Between them they hold 58 of the first-place votes published with the AVCA preseason poll on Aug. 10.
On Friday night the team ranked behind both of them walked into Milwaukee and swept a Final Four side in three sets.
Kentucky hit .380 doing it. Wisconsin, ranked sixth, hit .186. So the question is fair even in August, as long as the sample size stays stapled to it. Is No. 3 already too low?
The Case for Moving Kentucky Up
Start with the hitting. A .380 night against a top-10 blocking team is a November number. Louisville won the other match in the same arena on Friday and hit .241, and Wisconsin hit .186.
Kentucky's front line of Brooklyn DeLeye, Morgan Gaerte and Lizzie Carr combined for 30 kills on .435, better than any full team on the floor all night.
Then the net. The Wildcats put up 10 blocks to Wisconsin's five, and Kelly Sheffield said afterward that his block was "pretty much nonexistent."
A team does not win the net that clearly against a Final Four roster by accident in match one.
Then the history. Kentucky beat Wisconsin in five sets in the December national semifinal and lost only to Texas A&M after that. On Friday it beat the same program in three, and Texas A&M, the team that swept the Wildcats for the title, lost its own opener a few hours earlier in the same building.
Craig Skinner also replaced his biggest departure without a visible seam. Gaerte arrived from Notre Dame with 497 kills and a first-team All-ACC selection, brought in to cover for the graduated Eva Hudson.
She missed the exhibition against Dayton for precautionary reasons, was cleared on Aug. 19, and played Friday like nothing had happened.
The Case for Leaving It Alone
Now the other direction. Wisconsin committed 21 attack errors, and some of that is Kentucky's block and serve while a lot of it is a team playing its first competitive match with a reshaped lineup.
Sheffield's own diagnosis afterward was about his block, not about anything Kentucky did that cannot be solved, and coaches usually know which one they just watched.
The second set went to 26-24. Two points the other way and this is a four-setter, Kentucky's percentage falls, and nobody writes this article.
There is also the matter of who the Wildcats have not played. Pittsburgh, Nebraska, Texas, Stanford and Penn State are all still theoretical.
Preseason polls are not results either. They are votes on rosters, and Nebraska's roster case does not get weaker because the Huskers have not played.
Nebraska took 57 first-place votes on Aug. 10 and does not open until Aug. 29 against UNLV in Las Vegas. Texas plays its first match Saturday night.
Neither has had the chance to be wrong yet.
What Would Settle It
Sunday, and then the last week of August. Pittsburgh, ranked fourth and a No. 1 seed in December, plays Kentucky at 3 p.m. Central on ESPN, and two sweeps of Final Four teams in three days is a very different argument than one.
For what it is worth, Fiserv Forum held an announced 6,345 for Friday's session, roughly a third of what the same building drew when it set the NCAA regular-season attendance record in 2023.
Nebraska's first match comes eight days after the season began. Kentucky already has a sweep of a Final Four team in the bank.
That is a strange thing to be ranked behind two teams for, even in August.
