A Volleyball Kind Of Day - Sunday Cardinal Couple

Volleyball Visits Beantown

(Volleyball heads to Boston, but they wont be looking for Norm, Sam or Diane)

With a few specific exceptions, it feels like this weekend and last has been a little...dull?...in volleyball, across the country.  That's not to say that good teams aren't still playing quite well, they are, but by and large, they've been playing teams that fall down in the mid-ranks of their various conferences.

For the most part.

This is mostly intentional on the part of conferences, as they want to put the big splashy matchups late in the season, right before NCAA selection, to benefit from the recency bias that the committee uses.

(The B.C. court)

So the Cards had their home-and-home travel partners matches with a not-very-good Notre Dame last week, and this week take the northern swing for the ACC where they played a definitely not-very-good Syracuse team on Friday, and today take on an only-a-little-bit-better Boston College.  Syracuse, as Case mentioned yesterday, only has a single win in conference, Notre Dame only has a pair.  They play today, so someone is going to improve their record...a little.  Boston College is 5-8, though, which is, well, not great, but it's something anyway?

So the Cards, at 12-1 in conference are playing the Eagles, at 5-8.  You don't have to follow volleyball very closely to know who the favored team is, here.  As always in the ACC, however, BC is not a team to be taken for granted.  They were responsible for handing set losses to several of the undefeated teams in early conference play.  Stanford, Pitt, and UNC all had their first set loss in conference play come at the hands of BC, and in Pitt's case, it was their first set loss of the whole season.

(when we refer to "B.C." we mean Boston College, not the comic strip...)

As long as UofL continues their balanced attack, solid defense, and gets some good blocking, they'll win this game without too much trouble.  Get cocky, however, and the wheels could fall off.

 

The match today is at 1pm, as is typical for Sunday matches, and you can find the video (not always a given, at BC) on ACC Network Extra (streaming).

 

A Quick Look at Rankings

While I mentioned that this weekend and last has been a bit dull in volleyball across the nation, we haven't been completely bereft of spicy matches.  Last weekend, Miami upset Stanford which really helped solidify our hold on the 4th place ranking, dropping Stanford to 6th from their previous 5th.  Creighton was the big beneficiary of that ranking change, stepping up into the 5th place ranking.  That weekend also saw Georgia Tech vs North Carolina, two pretty good teams, go at it with the YellowJackets coming out on top...barely (25-23, 25-22, 19-25, 20-25, 15-12).

And we look beyond the ACC for another spicy matchup, that should help the Cards out, as 7th ranked Wisconsin, swept 3rd ranked Penn State.  And after the first set completed 25-23, it wasn't even that close, with the 2nd and 3rd sets going 25-12, and 25-13.

That should drop the Nittany Lions down a spot or two leaving an opening for Louisville to move up into 3rd.

(Sweet Home...KFC YUM Center...wher the Cards are so true...)

Looking ahead, there's definitely a good path for Louisville to play their full NCAA tournament run at the KFC Yum! Center.  They have to get a top four seeding from the committee to assure that, and they got that seeing in the early reveal back on October 20th, and that seeding, or better, has only gotten stronger support since then.  Of course, the Cards still have to close out the season with matches against Pitt and Stanford, so there are some potential stumbling blocks in the way, but overall the Cards are in a pretty good place right now.

Cardinal Couple Radio Hour Podcast

(Paulie loves volleyball, it is a inside sport where it isn't freezing)

It was just the two of us (cue Bill Withers) on the CCRHP yesterday, as Paulie and I held it down. We know not where Case or Jared were, just that they were out (conspiratorial theorist..begin...now) and Daryl was having work done o n the house 

We were thankful as we move into the Fall/Winter sports overlap, giving us both Basketball and Volleyball to cover.  OK, neither competition was against very competitive teams, but it was great to have basketball play to be talking about again.

Check it out at Spotify or your favorite podcast directory:

https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/cardinal-couple/episodes/Basketball-Begin-in-Earnest--Volleyball-Cruises-e2qpnph

-- JMcA