Women's Tennis: Round of 16 vs. North Carolina

Women's Tennis: Round of 16 vs. North Carolina - Printable Version

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RE: Women's Tennis: Round of 16 vs. North Carolina - ColoradoTree - 05-17-2018

UNC 1, Stanford 0

Singles update:

Court 1: Gordon tied 6-6
Court 2: Lord leads 6-4, 4-1 (up a double break)
Court 3: Lampl trails 4-6, 0-2 (down a break)
Court 4: Arbuthnott leads 6-3, 2-0 (up a break)
Court 5: Shin leads 6-3, 3-0 (up a break)
Court 6: Higuchi leads 6-1, 2-4

Oullet-Pizer has really picked up her level on Court 6, and we're in the unusual position of seeing Higuchi down a break (she's actually been broken both games so far this set, but broke UNC once herself). Gordon was up a break, 5-3 and serving for the first set, but was broken, Jones held for 5-5, but then Gordon held at love, and Jones just held to force a tiebreaker.

RE: Women's Tennis: Round of 16 vs. North Carolina - oldalum - 05-17-2018

(05-17-2018, 10:00 AM)ColoradoTree Wrote: If it helps, when Stanford won the title as a 15 seed two years ago, we lost the doubles point all the time, including in the NCAA title match vs. Oklahoma State.

A minor correction that doesn't detract from your point: In 2016 we won the doubles point (surprisingly at the time) against Vanderbilt in the semifinals, on our way to a 4-2 victory

RE: Women's Tennis: Round of 16 vs. North Carolina - ColoradoTree - 05-17-2018

UNC 1, Stanford 1

Singles update:

Court 1: Gordon tied 6-6
Court 2: Lord wins 6-4, 6-1
Court 3: Lampl trails 4-6, 1-3 (was down a double break, but just got one of them back)
Court 4: Arbuthnott leads 6-3, 4-0 (up a double break)
Court 5: Shin leads 6-3, 4-1 (up a break)
Court 6: Higuchi leads 6-1, 4-4

Lord levels it with an absolutely routine win at Court 2 over a much higher-ranked player. In what could prove a pivotal game, Higuchi came back from 40-0 down with Ouellet-Pizer serving up 4-2 and broke her on deciding point to get it back on serve, and promptly held to level at 4-4. Very, very big, given that Gordon lost her tiebreaker and Lampl is in rough shape.

RE: Women's Tennis: Round of 16 vs. North Carolina - oldalum - 05-17-2018

Texas Tech beat Texas 4-1, including on court 1 against the better Turati!

RE: Women's Tennis: Round of 16 vs. North Carolina - ColoradoTree - 05-17-2018

(05-17-2018, 11:06 AM)oldalum Wrote:
(05-17-2018, 10:00 AM)ColoradoTree Wrote: If it helps, when Stanford won the title as a 15 seed two years ago, we lost the doubles point all the time, including in the NCAA title match vs. Oklahoma State.

A minor correction that doesn't detract from your point: In 2016 we won the doubles point (surprisingly at the time) against Vanderbilt in the semifinals, on our way to a 4-2 victory

Totally fair. I didn't mean "all the time" literally, just that it happened frustratingly often.

RE: Women's Tennis: Round of 16 vs. North Carolina - oldalum - 05-17-2018

Seems like we'll need at least one of Gordon, Lampl, and Higuchi to win. Higuchi seems the best bet at present--she's serving for her match at 5-4!

RE: Women's Tennis: Round of 16 vs. North Carolina - BigEasyCard - 05-17-2018

Will it all come down to Higuchi?

Geaux Cardinal!

Edit: Oops, posted without seeing OldAlum's post. He said it better than I did.

RE: Women's Tennis: Round of 16 vs. North Carolina - ColoradoTree - 05-17-2018

Stanford 2, UNC 1

Singles update:

Court 1: Gordon trails 6-7, 2-0 (up a break)
Court 2: Lord won 6-4, 6-1
Court 3: Lampl trails 4-6, 2-4
Court 4: Arbuthnott leads 6-3, 5-1 (up a double break)
Court 5: Shin leads 6-3, 5-2 (up a break)
Court 6: Higuchi won 6-1, 6-4

What a momentum swing on Court 6! Down 4-1 in the second, Higuchi rattles off 6 straight to give Stanford the lead! We're a game away on 4 and 5 from the quarterfinals, so Arbuthnott and Shin just need to hold on! For her part, Gordon shook off her tiebreaker loss and is looking strong early in the second.

Arbuthnott wins 6-3, 6-1, and Stanford is one point away!

RE: Women's Tennis: Round of 16 vs. North Carolina - terry - 05-17-2018

Down go the Tar Heels!

Tree-mendous performance in singles. Wow!

All right now!

RE: Women's Tennis: Round of 16 vs. North Carolina - ColoradoTree - 05-17-2018

Shin takes it and Stanford is through to the quarterfinals!!!

RE: Women's Tennis: Round of 16 vs. North Carolina - oldalum - 05-17-2018

Shin wins and we win!!!!

Seems like we're back to our old 2016 formula: win on the 3 lower courts and get another point somewhere.
Having Arbuthnott on court 4 and Higuchi on court 6 is really just unfair--but I don't mind a bit.

RE: Women's Tennis: Round of 16 vs. North Carolina - Farm93 - 05-17-2018

So important that no one needed to go 3 sets.

I ALMOST feel sorry for UNC. Getting Stanford as the #15 seed, when you worked so hard to be one of the top seeds, was just wrong.

RE: Women's Tennis: Round of 16 vs. North Carolina - PVTree - 05-17-2018

Clearly NoCar did not like seeing Stanford on their side of the bracket, especially this early in the tournament.

RE: Women's Tennis: Round of 16 vs. North Carolina - Spiny_Norman - 05-17-2018

Fear the Tree! It's a great win, but more tough matches ahead. Stanford advances to the quarters on Saturday at 12 noon eastern/9 pacific against the winner of Georgia vs. South Carolina (the other U.SC).

RE: Women's Tennis: Round of 16 vs. North Carolina - ColoradoTree - 05-17-2018

No big deal, folks, just a comprehensive 4-1 win over the #1 team in the country after dropping the doubles point.

Goodness.

That match had no business being that lopsided. Sure, I expected Lord and Higuchi to play well and probably win in straight sets, but not to crush the souls of their opponents like that! Like I said earlier this postseason, our title hopes rest on either Lampl or Arbuthnott playing well, and today, Arbuthnott played as well as she ever has. Gordon has yet to complete a match so far in NCAAs (the plight of playing at #1 sometimes), but I was encouraged by how she started her second set--we'll need her to get a postseason win under her belt sooner or later.

But when you play a team this good, it's supposed to be close. I expected three setters all over the place, but hopefully with Stanford on the right side of enough of them. But four absolutely comprehensive wins is amazing. It is just not fair to the other teams in the bracket to have Stanford looming as a 15 seed.

For the record, it went Lord, Higuchi, Arbuthnott, and finally Shin with the clincher!  That's Shin's second clincher of the tournament so far--what freshman jitters?

RE: Women's Tennis: Round of 16 vs. North Carolina - terry - 05-17-2018

Just a reminder that the ITA rankings had Stanford at #46 earlier in the season. What a bunch of geniuses.

RE: Women's Tennis: Round of 16 vs. North Carolina - Spiny_Norman - 05-17-2018

(05-17-2018, 11:56 AM)terry Wrote: Just a reminder that the ITA rankings had Stanford at #46 earlier in the season. What a bunch of geniuses.

I think that was the point at which Stanford was 4-3 on the season with victories over San Jose St, St Marys, UNLV and TCU. Not much of a resume. But not many data points for the computers to work with either. Stanford's season turned around when it beat UCLA 4-3 without Lord and after losing the doubles point.

Including the UCLA victory, Stanford has now won 17 matches in a row.

RE: Women's Tennis: Round of 16 vs. North Carolina - terry - 05-17-2018

Computers only do what people tell them to do. The ITA designed the computer program, then accepted and published results that defied common sense. That's on them.

If there weren't enough data points, they should have waited until there were more data points. Or they should have incorporated some human judgment.

RE: Women's Tennis: Round of 16 vs. North Carolina - ColoradoTree - 05-17-2018

Oh, and for the record, UTR did pretty well in predicting the outcome here. Stanford had its two biggest UTR advantages at Courts 2 and 6, and that's where we got our quickest wins (a nominal upset according to ITA ranking at Court 2, where #40 Lord beat #26 Sanford). The match at 4 should have been a coin flip, but Arbuthnott rolled right over Alexa Graham (more in line with what the ITA ranking would predict, with #43 Arbuthnott playing #95 Graham). The final point came from Court 5, where Stanford had its 3rd-biggest UTR lead, 0.25.

So, Stanford notched wins at its 3 biggest UTR leads (2 of which were upsets according to the ITA rankings), and got its fourth point from what UTR saw as a coin flip and which the ITA had as a solid Arbuthnott advantage. In its 4th-biggest UTR lead (0.22), Stanford was effectively tied (6-7, 2-1, up a break).

Georgia and South Carolina are playing right now--we'll play the winner. UTR and ITA rankings agree that Georgia is better (Georgia has the 3rd-highest UTR Power 6 after Stanford and Pepperdine), but South Carolina won the regular-season matchup 4-1 in Athens, so we'll see. UTR would predict a very close match in singles, as even though Georgia has UTR leads in 5 of 6 matchups, three singles matchups are basically coin flips and the other three are decent Georgia leads, but one of this big leads is at Court 1, where Georgia got smoked the first time around.

1. UGA by 0.44
2. UGA by 0.10
3. UGA by 0.07
4. UGA by 0.44
5. SCAR by 0.11
6. UGA by 0.40

South Carolina currently leads comfortably in all 3 doubles matches and looks primed to win the point. In the regular season, South Carolina dropped the doubles point before rattling off four fairly comprehensive singles wins, so if they win doubles this time around, they have to feel great about their chances. An interesting match, with all of the metrics and rankings pointing to a Georgia win, but where the head to head result during the regular season went the other way (and it wasn't close, either). That H2H win led South Carolina to be a trendy upset pick (along with UCLA and Pepperdine, who are actually favorites according to UTR).

FYI, UCLA has close UTR deficits on the top 3 courts and big UTR leads on the bottom three, so since they're so good at doubles, they have to like their chances. And Pepperdine has solid UTR leads on all singles courts except for #1, so they should be in good shape.

(05-17-2018, 12:19 PM)terry Wrote: Computers only do what people tell them to do. The ITA designed the computer program, then accepted and published results that defied common sense. That's on them.

If there weren't enough data points, they should have waited until there were more data points.

I do feel for the ITA a bit. They've put together a system that works pretty well for everyone concerned, with two glaring exceptions:

1. Pepperdine is always underranked and underseeded because their conference stinks, even though every other team in the country is scared of their roster.

2. Stanford is always going to be a contender, but has just opted out of the rat race that leads to the ITA rankings, and thus the NCAA seeds. We play fewer matches overall and fewer Top 25 teams in particular, so any objective measure of team quality that looks to the quality of your wins and losses is going to undercount Stanford. But should the ITA change its rankings system because one team has a crappy conference and one team refuses to play the ITA's game?

What I think should happen is for the NCAA to use ITA rankings to determine the makeup of the NCAA field, but then use a more holistic approach to determining the teams' seeds to correct for its failure to adequately account for the quality of both Stanford and Pepperdine (which has been proven through NCAA results year after year).

Stanford was a really tough team to peg all year. We were the #1 preseason team in the country (according to the ITA, no less), but without Lord in the lineup, we dropped a couple of close matches to Top 10 teams (Texas and Florida) and then got swept at Vanderbilt. At that point in the year, our resume was trash, so I don't fault the ITA for saying that by an objective measure of schedule, we weren't very good. We haven't lost since Lord came back, though, and by UTR, at least, we're still arguably the best team in the country, but we played in a Pac-12 having a down year and our best wins are over the #14 team in the country, UCLA. So how do you seed a team with that profile? The correct answer is "higher," but how high? I think the USTA in its rankings had it about right, and that we probably should have been around 6th or so, though I couldn't have complained with anything in single digits. (FYI, if you put us at 6th and bump everyone else down a line, we would have played #11 South Carolina today and would have played #3 Duke on Saturday--both very dangerous teams.)

By using an objective measure to determine the makeup of the field, everyone knows the rules of how the rankings are developed, and I like how fair that is. But seeding should be the NCAA committee's independent judgment, taking both resume and their opinion of how good a team is into account. Pepperdine as a 13 seed is an even bigger joke than we are as a 15. Pepperdine should be no worse than the 4 seed (who they're playing today, so there's some cosmic balance there). If you think Stanford is the best team, then we just took the place of the 2 seed in the tournament, so from here on out, we might as well have been the 2.

RE: Women's Tennis: Round of 16 vs. North Carolina - BigEasyCard - 05-17-2018

Matter-of-fact article from UNC site:

https://goheels.com/news/2018/5/17/womens-tennis-carolina-falls-to-stanford-4-1.aspx

Geaux Cardinal!