[ColoradoTree]

(7) Georgia 2, (10) South Carolina 2

Remaining matches: 

Court 1: #12 Jokic (UGA) leads #59 Gamarra Martins (SCAR) 6-1, 3-6, 1-0 (on serve)
Court 3: Horvit (SCAR) leads #90 Gonzalez (UGA) 7-5, 3-0
Court 5: Christofi (UGA) leads #113 Davies (SCAR) 6-2, 4-5 (SCAR up a break)

Completed matches:

Court 2: #34 Berg (SCAR) d. #75 Shaffer (UGA) 6-2, 6-4
Court 4: Gould (UGA) d. Cline (SCAR) 6-4, 6-1 
Court 6: #103 Coppoc (UGA) d. Rohrabacher (SCAR) 6-1, 6-4

South Carolina forced at least one third set, and will serve to force another, so it's still very much in the balance.

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Big congrats to our women's team - what an outstanding win over the nation's top-ranked team! And yeah, must really suck to be UNC and work so hard only to get a grossly underseeded opponent this early in the tournament.

Without knowing tons about the world of women's tennis, it seems like the sport would benefit from a ranking system similar to college football during the BCS era, should they want to retain computer metrics. For the first half of the season, the focus was on the AP and Coaches rankings, and then mid-way through, switched over to the BCS rankings once there were sufficient metrics to make good judgments. Or maybe something more like the College Football Committee, which does manual rankings but takes lots of stats into consideration. Regardless, when we're beating higher ranked teams almost 9 times out of 10, it's abundantly clear we are being systematically underranked year after year.

Re: this being the result of our light schedule, in professional tennis, the rankings reward playing a certain number of tournaments in order to incentivize participation, which is the way the sport monetizes itself. But I don't think the college tennis tournaments are making anyone any money, so a rankings system that punishes schools that prioritize their students' academics and minimize mid-week travel seems perverse, to say the least. This should really be addressed, along with the requirement of a winning record, so obviate any future Razerback-esque shenanigans.

Interesting points, and I certainly agree that (1) college tennis tournaments aren't making anyone any money, and (2) Stanford is perenially and systematically underranked, so something should be done.

The ITA rankings actually do what you suggest already.  They go with a committee approach for the first several weeks of the season (where Stanford traditionally does very well) before it goes over to the algorithm for the rest of the season.  What the ITA rankings do is count your 10 best wins and subtract points for all of your losses.  Wins over good teams are worth more, and losses to good teams barely hurt your ranking at all, while losses to bad teams hurt more.  Your 11th-best win doesn't factor in at all, nor do wins less impressive than that. Theoretically, Stanford could play as an independent, only play the top 10 other teams in the country, go 10-0, and they'd be the #1 team in the country by far.  So, you could argue that the ITA ranking system doesn't demand mid-week matches and tournament play more than it demands a certain number of matches against good teams.  The way the early season has developed, however, most of the top teams are locked into Kick-Off Weekend and National Indoors, so those are two weeks/weekends that are booked, making it tougher to schedule some of those top teams.  That said, usually wins over Cal, UCLA, and USC count for a lot, but this year, only UCLA held up its end of the bargain, so beating Cal and USC this year just didn't move the needle. 

In my mind, there's no way to do an objective set of rankings that accurately captures how good Stanford and Pepperdine are, because of our schedule and perhaps weakening conference, and because of Pepperdine's terrible conference.  Slam.tennis is trying to create an ELO-type ranking system for tennis, however: https://slam.tennis/teams/rankings.asp?s...en&week=13  After the first two rounds of the tournament, Stanford was 6th in that ranking.  (This match, over the #1 team in that ranking, will certainly help.)  That ranking is something to keep an eye on moving forward. More information, and more ways of looking at how good a team is, should only help Stanford.

I'm not saying the ITA and the NCAA don't have some blame here.  They do (particularly the NCAA, since they're the ones that set the seeds and can depart all they want from ITA rankings).  But other teams are choosing to play tougher schedules, while we mostly don't, so any ranking that purports to be objective is going to underrank Stanford.  The only way to get to a fair ranking, from Stanford's perspective, is to follow your alternative approach: have a poll of experts do the rankings until the bitter end and never switch over to an objective results-based ranking.  I'd be in favor of that approach, and the USTA started doing that this year--in the final pre-NCAA rankings, Pepperdine was 4th and Stanford was 6th, which is probably about right.  If only the NCAA would start looking to the USTA rankings, then we'd be in much better shape.

[ColoradoTree]

(7) Georgia 2, (10) South Carolina 2

Remaining matches: 

Court 1: #12 Jokic (UGA) leads #59 Gamarra Martins (SCAR) 6-1, 3-6, 1-0 (on serve)
Court 3: Horvit (SCAR) leads #90 Gonzalez (UGA) 7-5, 3-0
Court 5: Christofi (UGA) leads #113 Davies (SCAR) 6-2, 4-5 (SCAR up a break)

Completed matches:

Court 2: #34 Berg (SCAR) d. #75 Shaffer (UGA) 6-2, 6-4
Court 4: Gould (UGA) d. Cline (SCAR) 6-4, 6-1 
Court 6: #103 Coppoc (UGA) d. Rohrabacher (SCAR) 6-1, 6-4

South Carolina forced at least one third set, and will serve to force another, so it's still very much in the balance.

---

Big congrats to our women's team - what an outstanding win over the nation's top-ranked team! And yeah, must really suck to be UNC and work so hard only to get a grossly underseeded opponent this early in the tournament.

Without knowing tons about the world of women's tennis, it seems like the sport would benefit from a ranking system similar to college football during the BCS era, should they want to retain computer metrics. For the first half of the season, the focus was on the AP and Coaches rankings, and then mid-way through, switched over to the BCS rankings once there were sufficient metrics to make good judgments. Or maybe something more like the College Football Committee, which does manual rankings but takes lots of stats into consideration. Regardless, when we're beating higher ranked teams almost 9 times out of 10, it's abundantly clear we are being systematically underranked year after year.

Re: this being the result of our light schedule, in professional tennis, the rankings reward playing a certain number of tournaments in order to incentivize participation, which is the way the sport monetizes itself. But I don't think the college tennis tournaments are making anyone any money, so a rankings system that punishes schools that prioritize their students' academics and minimize mid-week travel seems perverse, to say the least. This should really be addressed, along with the requirement of a winning record, so obviate any future Razerback-esque shenanigans.

Interesting points, and I certainly agree that (1) college tennis tournaments aren't making anyone any money, and (2) Stanford is perenially and systematically underranked, so something should be done.

The ITA rankings actually do what you suggest already.  They go with a committee approach for the first several weeks of the season (where Stanford traditionally does very well) before it goes over to the algorithm for the rest of the season.  What the ITA rankings do is count your 10 best wins and subtract points for all of your losses.  Wins over good teams are worth more, and losses to good teams barely hurt your ranking at all, while losses to bad teams hurt more.  Your 11th-best win doesn't factor in at all, nor do wins less impressive than that. Theoretically, Stanford could play as an independent, only play the top 10 other teams in the country, go 10-0, and they'd be the #1 team in the country by far.  So, you could argue that the ITA ranking system doesn't demand mid-week matches and tournament play more than it demands a certain number of matches against good teams.  The way the early season has developed, however, most of the top teams are locked into Kick-Off Weekend and National Indoors, so those are two weeks/weekends that are booked, making it tougher to schedule some of those top teams.  That said, usually wins over Cal, UCLA, and USC count for a lot, but this year, only UCLA held up its end of the bargain, so beating Cal and USC this year just didn't move the needle. 

In my mind, there's no way to do an objective set of rankings that accurately captures how good Stanford and Pepperdine are, because of our schedule and perhaps weakening conference, and because of Pepperdine's terrible conference.  Slam.tennis is trying to create an ELO-type ranking system for tennis, however: https://slam.tennis/teams/rankings.asp?s...en&week=13  After the first two rounds of the tournament, Stanford was 6th in that ranking.  (This match, over the #1 team in that ranking, will certainly help.)  That ranking is something to keep an eye on moving forward. More information, and more ways of looking at how good a team is, should only help Stanford.

I'm not saying the ITA and the NCAA don't have some blame here.  They do (particularly the NCAA, since they're the ones that set the seeds and can depart all they want from ITA rankings).  But other teams are choosing to play tougher schedules, while we mostly don't, so any ranking that purports to be objective is going to underrank Stanford.  The only way to get to a fair ranking, from Stanford's perspective, is to follow your alternative approach: have a poll of experts do the rankings until the bitter end and never switch over to an objective results-based ranking.  I'd be in favor of that approach, and the USTA started doing that this year--in the final pre-NCAA rankings, Pepperdine was 4th and Stanford was 6th, which is probably about right.  If only the NCAA would start looking to the USTA rankings, then we'd be in much better shape.