ITA Indoor Championship 2019 - Printable Version

ITA Indoor Championship 2019 - Printable Version

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ITA Indoor Championship 2019 - oldalum - 06-09-2018

Someone important must have been reading CT's posts this season, because we will be hosting an ITA kickoff weekend site next January and will undoubtedly be competing in the ITA Indoors Championship afterward. I look forward to having no #45 rankings or #15 seeds next year!

RE: ITA Indoor Championship 2019 - PVTree - 06-10-2018

I'm on the fence on this. Not participating in the indoors has not affected our performance when it counts; we keep winning championships. We know our ranking doesn't matter because we will outperform it. So, what benefit will we get from this?

RE: ITA Indoor Championship 2019 - oldalum - 06-10-2018

I suspect the primary benefit is more matches against better competition, now that the Pac-12 is in a down cycle. The coaches obviously have a reason for doing it. But the fact that we have been winning without competing in the ITA Indoors doesn't mean we wouldn't have been better had we competed in it; our last two championships have been won by a whisker (versus our thumping by Florida last year). Having a low seed does hurt us in the NCAAs, it just hasn't been decisive--yet. In the NCAAs we have to play earlier/more against tougher competition than our rivals for the crown. This wears us down more, and with the semi-randomness of the deuce point acting as a wild card, the more close matches you play the more likely you will lose one. Two years ago in the NCAAs, every one of our wins beginning with the second round was 4-3 except the semifinal against Vanderbilt (4-2 because we unexpectedly won the doubles point in that match).

RE: ITA Indoor Championship 2019 - ColoradoTree - 06-11-2018

(06-10-2018, 10:15 PM)oldalum Wrote: I suspect the primary benefit is more matches against better competition, now that the Pac-12 is in a down cycle. The coaches obviously have a reason for doing it. But the fact that we have been winning without competing in the ITA Indoors doesn't mean we wouldn't have been better had we competed in it; our last two championships have been won by a whisker (versus our thumping by Florida last year). Having a low seed does hurt us in the NCAAs, it just hasn't been decisive--yet. In the NCAAs we have to play earlier/more against tougher competition than our rivals for the crown. This wears us down more, and with the semi-randomness of the deuce point acting as a wild card, the more close matches you play the more likely you will lose one. Two years ago in the NCAAs, every one of our wins beginning with the second round was 4-3 except the semifinal against Vanderbilt (4-2 because we unexpectedly won the doubles point in that match).

I was out of town last week, so didn't get a chance to comment on this news. The biggest reason for why this makes sense is that starting next year, the NCAA tennis championships will adopt the baseball/softball super regional approach, so getting a top 16 ranking is no longer enough to ensure home court until you head to the final site--you need a top 8 seed. Stanford might occasionally still do that if it were to skip ITA Kick-Off Weekend/Indoor Nationals--Stanford was the #7 seed in 2017 after a 21-2 regular season, going undefeated in Pac-12 play and losing only two matches, both on the road to highly-ranked teams--but more often than not, Stanford would be somewhere from 9-15 after having objectively successful seasons, with 2 or 3 losses to good teams. We lost to Pepperdine and Florida in 2017 and got the 7 seed, but we lost to Florida, Vanderbilt, and Texas in 2018 and got the 15.

When the only goals are (1) to win national championships, and (2) get home court until you travel to the final site, we could get away with a lighter schedule and still get a seed, albeit a double-digit one. But if those are still your only two goals, and now you need to get into the top eight to satisfy them, well, that's tougher. You can't assume the Pac-12 schedule and a few marquee matches will be enough, so you need bigger and better wins in most years.  If the NCAA weren't changing the championship format, I assume Lele would keep going with what has been working the last few years.

I wonder what this will mean for the rest of the non-conference schedule. If you win Kick-Off weekend but lose right away at Indoor Nationals, you don't get a schedule boost, so it would be good to have some Top 10 caliber teams anyway, like continuing the Florida and Vanderbilt duals. (For example, Cal played Kick-Off weekend this past year, lost in an upset, never even made it to Indoor Nationals, and they didn't have enough good wins to even get them into the tournament because they were idle during Indoor Nationals. You can't assume you'll win a few matches at Indoor Nationals.)  Vanderbilt, at least, would be at our place next year, so no reason to give up on that one yet. I would think the Pepperdine series would continue as well, and should also be at our place since the home match was rained out this past season. If we continue Florida, then I'd like to see us add a one-off the same weekend in Gainesville, someone in the 15-25 range like Florida State or UCF.

In any event, Kick-Off Weekend next year won't look too much different than our schedule this year. The 2 seed in our region is #42 Washington State, the 3 seed is #54 SMU, and the 4 seed is #63 St. Mary's, so we'll play St. Mary's and the WSU-SMU winner. I suspect that means St. Mary's won't be on our regular non-conference schedule.

As an aside, the way teams are placed into regionals for Kick-Off Weekend is very interesting.  Once the 15 host teams are decided by final season ranking--the 16th spot at Indoor Nationals is given to the host institution, which next year will be Washington--the remaining teams choose which regional site they want to attend, in order. Not surprisingly, teams stayed away from Stanford and the other top 3 teams, Vanderbilt, UNC, and Duke. So, after just 7 selections, the regionals for #14 Oklahoma State and #15 Northwestern filled up very fast. The bottom seeds always fill up first, but it makes even more sense this year, as Northwestern loses 3 starters, including its top 2 singles players, and Oklahoma State also loses two Top 50 players, so those will be very competitive regionals. #5 Georgia Tech filled up next, which seems odd at first, but Georgia Tech lost two starters to graduation and a third starter to Florida as a transfer, so it made a lot of sense for, say, #26 Kentucky to decide to be the 3 seed in that regional rather than be the 2 seed against a stronger team. Towards the end, a team like St. Mary's is content to play at Stanford and get crushed locally, rather than fly to Nashville or Chapel Hill and get crushed there.  Thus, while Stanford hosts the #42, #54, and #63 teams, Northwestern hosts #17, #19, and #22, while Oklahoma State hosts #18, #20, and #23. Whoever emerges from those regionals will see a tangible boost in their ranking just from Kick-Off Weekend, while teams like Stanford and Vanderbilt will have to win a couple matches at Indoor Nationals to see any kind of boost.

The regional lineups are a good barometer for how good other coaches think certain teams are. Through this draft, coaches showed they're afraid of the top 4 teams, they think #5 Georgia Tech, #8 Ole Miss, #11 Florida, and #12 South Carolina might be vulnerable, they want to steer clear of #7 Georgia and #10 UCLA, and they're salivating to get a chance at Oklahoma State and Northwestern.

RE: ITA Indoor Championship 2019 - 2006alum - 06-11-2018

Thanks COTree - this is super helpful and provides all the context necessary to understand these choices (both ours and the teams picking their Kick-Off Weekend sites).

It's frustrating that tennis doesn't have some way for the prior season's results to at least partially influence rankings, at least at the beginning of the season. Unlike true team sports like basketball or football, where even losing one starting PG or QB can really alter the entire team's trajectory, tennis is a sport of individuals, so I would think the prior season's rankings would have more predictive power. Certainly, it would be odd if on the pro tour they ranked players for the French Open based only on results since January. Having some sort of 52-week rolling ranking would make much more sense.

To that end, why couldn't the NCAA just tally up the team's collective UTR as calculated from singles matches for 1-6 and from double matches for the three doubles teams? Or at least have that play some role in the rankings? It just seems absurd that so much of the first half of the season is spent managing matches to establish a suitable ranking. 52-week UTR would do much to mitigate that.

RE: ITA Indoor Championship 2019 - ColoradoTree - 06-11-2018

Here are all the Pac-12 placements:

1. Stanford (regional 1 seed/host)
10. UCLA (regional 1 seed/host)
28. Oregon (2 seed at #13 Pepperdine's regional, with #58 Denver and #70 UNLV as the remaining two seeds)
36. Arizona State (3 seed at #12 South Carolina's regional, with #27 Wake Forest as the 2 seed and #52 Cal as the 4 seed)
42. Washington State (2 seed at Stanford's regional)
43. Washington (qualifies directly for Indoor Nationals as the host, so they're not part of this step).
52. Cal (4 seed at #12 South Carolina's regional, but I wouldn't be surprised if they advanced).

Interesting that Oregon chose to go to Pepperdine when they could have been the 2 seed at Florida, but geography/expense could have been a consideration. And at a certain point, your opportunity to win two matches and advance to Indoor Nationals might not be great, so you might as well just get a 2 seed in a good location and hope for a decent team you can beat as the 3. But based on where teams chose to be 3 and 4 seeds, Pepperdine is still seen as tough (#58 and #70 are right up there for the worst rankings for a pair of 3/4 seeds). I like ASU choosing to be the 3 seed at South Carolina rather than a 2 seed elsewhere. They get a beatable Wake Forest for the first match, and South Carolina could be down after seemingly overperforming this year and losing their #2 singles player. Wazzu chose to come to Stanford as the 2 seed over being the 3 seed at UCLA, and they get an easier first-round match for it, but I would've liked their chances against #41 FIU, who lost 3 starters, and they would have had a more manageable second-round match vs. UCLA than vs. Stanford, but perhaps they were thinking like Oregon did--just get a 2 seed in your time zone and try and get at least one win out of this. And even though Cal is the 4 seed in its regional, I think they chose smartly. Better to be the 4 seed in a competitive regional with a vulnerable 1 seed than a 3 seed with a tough 1 seed looming in the second round. It could easily be Cal-ASU for a trip to Indoor Nationals, and if you're either team, you're content with that matchup. And even though Stanford is the #1 overall seed, our regional filled up sooner than seven others, though I think that is due to St. Mary's choosing to be a 4 seed locally than a 4 seed across the country, not a sense that we're more vulnerable than UCLA, Florida, or Texas.

Here's a link to the makeup of the various regional sites: https://www.slam.tennis/ita/draft/2019/ncaaw

For whatever reason, USC opted out of the tournament entirely. (In another interesting quirk, teams can simply wait for their turn and then pass, as some teams in line for a 4 seed did when the only regionals left weren't close by or were likely already on the schedule, like Houston passing when a 4 seed in Austin was still available--might as well get someone else on the schedule that weekend. But USC wasn't even on the draft board, indicating they told the ITA they weren't participating no matter what.) Utah, Colorado, and Arizona were ranked too low to participate, though had three more schools passed, Utah could have been the last 4 seed.

RE: ITA Indoor Championship 2019 - BobK - 06-11-2018

We waited for the Tree to post, all makes sense now. Thanks

RE: ITA Indoor Championship 2019 - ColoradoTree - 06-11-2018

(06-11-2018, 10:22 AM)2006alum Wrote: Thanks COTree - this is super helpful and provides all the context necessary to understand these choices (both ours and the teams picking their Kick-Off Weekend sites).

It's frustrating that tennis doesn't have some way for the prior season's results to at least partially influence rankings, at least at the beginning of the season. Unlike true team sports like basketball or football, where even losing one starting PG or QB can really alter the entire team's trajectory, tennis is a sport of individuals, so I would think the prior season's rankings would have more predictive power. Certainly, it would be odd if on the pro tour they ranked players for the French Open based only on results since January. Having some sort of 52-week rolling ranking would make much more sense.

To that end, why couldn't the NCAA just tally up the team's collective UTR as calculated from singles matches for 1-6 and from double matches for the three doubles teams? Or at least have that play some role in the rankings? It just seems absurd that so much of the first half of the season is spent managing matches to establish a suitable ranking. 52-week UTR would do much to mitigate that.

Good question and thoughts. I suppose the answer is that while there's no formal relationship between a team's prior-year performance and the new season's rankings, there's a very strong informal relationship, since the early-season rankings are done by committee and they naturally factor in roster makeup, last year's performance, and the quality of incoming recruits. For example, here are the first team rankings of this past season, done by the ITA committee: http://www.itatennis.com/ResultsAndRankings/Rankings/Oracle_ITA_Division_I_Women_s_Collegiate_Tennis_Rankings/Oracle_ITA_Division_I_Women_s_National_Preseason_Team_Ranking_-_Jan__3.htm

They helpfully show the final 2017 rankings, and with a few exceptions, they're pretty close to how things ended up the prior year. Some of the particular cases with bigger drops/rises are interesting, though:

* The committee thought Texas would be improved, with a preseason #12 ranking compared to a final #22 ranking in 2017. Good prediction, but underestimated how big the jump would be (UT finished #6).
* The committee thought Ohio State would take a dip due to losing some seniors (#3 final 2017 ranking to #13 preseason ranking), but underestimated how much of a dip they took, as the Buckeyes finished #33.
* They thought Ole Miss would improve (#32 to #23), but underestimated how big of a jump they would have (Ole Miss finished #8).
* They thought UCLA would improve (#23 to #17), and they were right but again underestimated how much (UCLA finished #10).

Interestingly, the committee gave Cal the #11 preseason ranking after a #13 2017 finish, and that looks like their biggest swing and miss (finished #52). They thought Arkansas would be better (#18) than they ended up being (#35 plus shenanigans), and they underestimated Duke and FSU, but in each of those cases, the problem was that they stuck too closely to the previous year's rankings, not that they diverged too much. All in all, they did a pretty decent job of predicting how things would end up.

I suppose the bigger concern isn't the early-season committee rankings, but how they're affected by the switch to the automated rankings in late February after Indoor Nationals. But aside from the teams opting out of the tournament like Stanford has the past several years, that methodological switch doesn't create too much havoc, though it obviously puts excessive weight on Indoor Nationals, since that's the only time where good teams have played other good teams at that point in the young season. I'd be OK with your change for some of the season, but at some point, you have to judge a team based on what it's done in the current season, and that would have to happen before NCAA selection at a minimum, and probably conference tournaments. I'd also be fine keeping a committee approach longer into the season and not switching over to the automated system until later--or, even better, keeping a committee approach all season long. That's what I really think should happen, which could take the ITA automated ranking as just one piece of data to measure quality of wins, and then factor in UTR, the USTA experts' poll, and other data to come up with a better ranking. Last year, the committee should have considered how Lord's injury impacted Stanford and how UTR showed Stanford was a superior team to many higher-ranked ones, but they obviously didn't.  (That said, by playing Indoor Nationals and hopefully with a resurgent Pac-12, the ranking/seeding complaints of the last few years should be a thing of the past, as the gap should close between (1) our resume when compared to other teams and (2) how good we are. If we go into the 2019 NCAAs with the best UTR ranking but, say, the 5th or 6th seed, it'll likely be because we lost to some teams ranked above us, and that's as it should be.)

There are obviously many differences between college tennis and pros, but even though both have a defined season, there is just one tournament that matters in college tennis, and it concludes the season. You don't have the same problem with seeding players for four Grand Slams that take place at different points throughout the calendar, so you need some sort of rolling average to fairly seed players for the four most important tournaments of the year. (A closer analogue to the NCAA tournament is the season-closing events, the WTA Finals and ATP Finals, where only points earned during that season count towards qualifying for those year-end events.)

I think UTR and the prior year's results are the main components of the committee's preseason rankings, which are in turn used for seeding the fall individual tournaments. UTR fades out over time as more current-year results are available, I believe.

And an important point to keep in mind is that your resume is recalculated every week to take into account changes in the rankings, so an early-season win over a struggling Stanford team may only count as a win over the #25 or #46 team at the time, but by the time the NCAA field was determined, we were #15, so Vanderbilt, for example, was given credit for beating the #15 team in the final rankings before NCAAs. Losing to Florida when we did was really damaging to our ranking, because they were unranked then, but as they turned it around in SEC play, that loss became less and less of a blemish, and by the final pre-NCAA rankings, it barely affected our ranking at all because the Gators were back in the top 10. So, as the season proceeds, some of that early-season noise should get smoothed out.

RE: ITA Indoor Championship 2019 - BostonCard - 06-11-2018

(06-11-2018, 10:09 AM)ColoradoTree Wrote: As an aside, the way teams are placed into regionals for Kick-Off Weekend is very interesting. Once the 15 host teams are decided by final season ranking--the 16th spot at Indoor Nationals is given to the host institution, which next year will be Washington--the remaining teams choose which regional site they want to attend, in order. Not surprisingly, teams stayed away from Stanford and the other top 3 teams, Vanderbilt, UNC, and Duke. So, after just 7 selections, the regionals for #14 Oklahoma State and #15 Northwestern filled up very fast. The bottom seeds always fill up first, but it makes even more sense this year, as Northwestern loses 3 starters, including its top 2 singles players, and Oklahoma State also loses two Top 50 players, so those will be very competitive regionals. #5 Georgia Tech filled up next, which seems odd at first, but Georgia Tech lost two starters to graduation and a third starter to Florida as a transfer, so it made a lot of sense for, say, #26 Kentucky to decide to be the 3 seed in that regional rather than be the 2 seed against a stronger team. Towards the end, a team like St. Mary's is content to play at Stanford and get crushed locally, rather than fly to Nashville or Chapel Hill and get crushed there. Thus, while Stanford hosts the #42, #54, and #63 teams, Northwestern hosts #17, #19, and #22, while Oklahoma State hosts #18, #20, and #23. Whoever emerges from those regionals will see a tangible boost in their ranking just from Kick-Off Weekend, while teams like Stanford and Vanderbilt will have to win a couple matches at Indoor Nationals to see any kind of boost.

Just want to say, that is fascinating and brilliant. First off, it makes complete sense for the teams having to play the regionals to decide what is a tougher match-up for them rather than rely on flawed rankings. The team is going to be most incentivized to find the best match-up for themselves, rather than some arbitrary committee, weighing the strength of the opposition, match-ups, and locations. It is fascinating that some teams opted to be three seeds in weaker regional than a two seed in a stronger one (though as a two seed they would likely face a weaker first round match-up).

I would advocate that a similar approach be used in designing the NCAA draw. I am sure seeds below us would have avoided early round match-ups with us like the plague despite our 15 seed. And we might have played a draw that had teams seeded in the middle earlier to avoid the #2 overall seed in the round of 16. Interesting to think about strategy here.

BC

RE: ITA Indoor Championship 2019 - oldalum - 06-11-2018

Seems like this could be used in soccer too. But I think the issue with this approach for NCAA tournaments would be travel expenses, which I believe the NCAA pays for and tries to minimize (usually to our disadvantage in W soccer because of nearby Santa Clara and Cal: e.g., our second-round loss 2 seasons ago to a strong Santa Clara team that went on to the regional final).

RE: ITA Indoor Championship 2019 - BostonCard - 06-11-2018

(06-11-2018, 06:34 PM)oldalum Wrote: Seems like this could be used in soccer too. But I think the issue with this approach for NCAA tournaments would be travel expenses, which I believe the NCAA pays for and tries to minimize (usually to our disadvantage in W soccer).

Well, teams would generally be incentivized to minimize travel; as ColoradoTree noted, why would a team like St. Mary's fly across country to be whalloped when they can play Stanford and be sacrificial lambs locally. It might not minimize travel as much as the NCAA might, but it would still do a pretty good job.

BC

RE: ITA Indoor Championship 2019 - oldalum - 06-11-2018

What I meant was, if the NCAA paid for travel as I believe it does now, teams would not have an incentive to minimize it, which would raise the cost of the tournament for the NCAA and reduce its profitability--which I assume would be anathema to the NCAA. If teams were responsible for their own travel costs for the NCAA tournament, the NCAA would be happy with that arrangement from a financial standpoint, but it would be seen as skewing the tournament in favor of richer schools who could "buy" their way to better matchups. The ITA Indoors is an optional pre-season tournament, while the NCAA tournament is the whole tamale.