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Should Pitt Be No. 1 Now? 🤔
The rankings have not moved since 10 August. Four of the top ten have not played a match, one is 2-0 and the defending champion is 0-2.
Sixty-three coaches voted Nebraska No. 1 on 10 August, and Nebraska has not played a match since. Neither has Stanford, Purdue or Penn State.
The AVCA's Division I poll has not moved in fifteen days. NCAA.com still stamps its rankings page as current through games played on 10 August, and the first in-season ballot is not released until Monday.
What follows is an argument about a ranking that four of its top ten teams have not yet tested, built on eight matches played over four days in one arena in Milwaukee.
Six of those eight put two ranked teams on the same court. Three of the six went to the lower-ranked side.
Four of the Top Ten Have Not Played
Nebraska, Stanford, Purdue and Penn State were ranked first, fifth, ninth and tenth on 10 August and are all 0-0. Nebraska opens against UNLV on Saturday. Stanford plays Wisconsin on Friday.
That is not a criticism. The number in front of their names is measuring last season and a returning roster, which is all it can measure until somebody serves.
Wisconsin lost to Kentucky on Friday and then beat Louisville on Saturday. Louisville had beaten Texas A&M the night before that, which is how two teams ranked sixth and seventh both finished the weekend at .500.
The AVCA waits for the first full weekend before it publishes an in-season ballot, which is why nothing has moved. Week zero does not exist in the poll's arithmetic, whatever it looked like from the seats at Fiserv Forum.
Fifteen days is a long time to be ranked on nothing.
Arizona State Was Twelfth and Beat the Second
Arizona State beat Texas 3-1 on Saturday at Fiserv Forum in front of 8,036 people. Texas hit .065 and made 29 attack errors, the worst attacking night any top-five team had all weekend.
Arizona State was ranked twelfth on 10 August after going 28-4 and winning a second straight Big 12 title. It has not lost. The gap between twelfth and second is currently ten places of pure inertia.
SMU is the other one. It was ranked eleventh on 10 August and swept the reigning national champion in three sets.
Texas then needed five sets to get past unranked Marquette on Monday. The Longhorns are 1-1 and hold the second-highest ranking in the country.
Pitt Has the Only Win That Moves Anything
Pittsburgh went to Milwaukee ranked fourth, beat No. 3 Kentucky in four and swept Xavier the next afternoon. Olivia Babcock hit 27 kills past Kentucky and Pitt held the Wildcats to .086.
Kentucky went into that match having swept No. 6 Wisconsin and hit .380 doing it. Pitt held the same team to .086, which is Kentucky's lowest attacking figure since a three-set loss to Pitt in September 2023.
Nobody else in the preseason top ten left Milwaukee unbeaten. Kentucky, Wisconsin, Louisville and Texas all finished 1-1, and Texas A&M finished 0-2.
The case for Pitt is short. It is the only team in the preseason top ten that has beaten a ranked opponent, the only one that has not lost, and it did both inside three days.
The case for Nebraska is also short. It lost nobody with eligibility left to the transfer portal for a second straight year, it collected 57 of 63 first-place votes on that basis in August, and nothing that has happened since involves Nebraska at all.
We would vote Pittsburgh first on Monday and expect to be in a small minority.
The Champions Are 0-2 and Ranked Eighth
Texas A&M lost to Louisville in four on Friday and was swept by SMU on Sunday, and it is the only defending national champion in the sport currently without a win.
Jamie Morrison coaches Texas A&M and spoke after the SMU match. The ellipsis below is the university's own.
Obviously we're disappointed that we lost, but SMU is a great team. So congratulations to them on a hard-fought win. One of the things we just talked about is we've got to make sure that we learn lessons quickly within this and throughout the season...but I'm happy with the progress our team is making, and we're really excited to get back home and get back to work.
The poll released on 10 August has Texas A&M eighth and SMU eleventh. SMU beat Texas A&M 27-25, 25-19, 25-20 and has not lost a match.
What Monday's Ballot Actually Decides
The first in-season poll arrives Monday and will be the first ranking of this season anybody has earned. Sixty-three coaches decide how much a week of results outweighs a summer of expectation.
Watch the gap between Nebraska and Pittsburgh.
If Nebraska is still first on Monday having beaten only UNLV, the ballot is saying that expectation outweighs results. That is a defensible position and somebody should have to defend it out loud.
