When it’s national championship time, it’s time to hand out the hardware. The top two seeded teams in the tournament split the major awards.
The Player of the Year nod went to (perhaps) the most obvious choice, BYU’s Taylor Sander. Obvious choice doesn’t mean wrong choice, it just means obvious. As I said when enumerating the season’s All-Americans, and specifically the first-teamers from whom this selection would be drawn, there was no horrible choice in the lot. Sander’s a good pick. He’s perhaps the most complete player in the sport this season, serving bullets and hitting missiles (holy violent metaphors, Batman) from any place on the court at any time. If the Cougars take the national championship, it’ll be Sander who leads the way.
The Coach of the Year winner, which you already know if you’ve been following along, is Loyola’s Shane Davis. I think this pick might ruffle a few feathers — usually the Coach of the Year award goes to the coach of some plucky overachieving team that unexpectedly make waves (and yeah — I saw some people saying that Pepperdine’s Marv Dunphy was their pick). But I don’t think anyone expected Loyola would be quite this good. Sure, they were in the NCAA tournament last year, sure, they returned basically everyone, sure, they were huge favourites to win the MIVA. But to top the national rankings basically all season? To go undefeated on the road? To lose just once all regular season, on the third match in three nights against top-10 competition? That’s a heck of a season, no matter what happens this week. It wasn’t that long ago that Loyola were ‘plucky overachievers,’ and some measure of the credit for the transformation has got to go to the coach. So I think it’s a good pick. Congrats coach.
The other thing I want to mention is, a bit belatedly, the quarterfinal tournament matches from Tuesday night. I tried to watch them — even went to a cafe with a wifi signal so I wouldn’t have to contend with my (repeatedly) maligned choppy home signal. It still didn’t work. I got 2 seconds of match followed by 15-60 seconds of buffering. I was really disappointed, but there wasn’t anything to be done about it. It seems I need a new computer rather than a new connection, because other people watching the match had no real problems with the stream.
The matches went more or less to form. Stanford defeated a — let’s be honest here — badly outmatched Erskine team by a (25-14, 25-16, 25-15) count. Brian Cook led the way for the Cardinal with 12 kills on .526 hitting, and Stanford — a team not always known as being strong on blocking — won the blocking battle 13 to 2. In the nightcap, Penn State picked up their first NCAA tournament win since 2010, defeating Lewis (27-25, 19-25, 25-23, 25-19). Aaron Russell had one of his ‘little bit of everything’ performances, notching 20 kills at a .364 clip, to go with 4 blocks, 9 digs, and 2 service aces.
I’ve got a bone to pick with respect to these matches, though. And actually, ‘respect’ is the perfect word for it. You know what ncaa.com has to say about these matches? Nothing. You have to go to the school’s websites to find the information. Check out the bracket on ncaa.com. It doesn’t even show Erskine and Lewis as having been in the tournament (before the matches went final, it did say “Lewis/Penn State” and “Stanford/Erskine”). Pretty much any reference to this round of the tournament called it, and the matches specifically, the “play-in” round/matches.
I get that the additional round of the tournament, and the additional two teams and two matches, are a new thing, but this is kind of a load in my mind. Were Erskine and Lewis not in the tournament? Was it not Stanford’s and Penn State’s wins on Tuesday that get them the right to play tonight? I don’t think it’s fair to make like those matches are some separate thing, and now that we’re into the Final Four, it’s the ‘real’ tournament. Not sure anyone consciously feels that way, but it’s sure what the NCAA website makes it look like. It’s definitely not to fair to Erskine and Conference Carolinas. They count just as much as the MPSF, MIVA, and EIVA now.
So I hope next year the quarterfinal round, as I’m gonna keep calling it, gets more attention (maybe even ncaa.com streams, like the semifinals tonight?). Unless there’s some drastic cost issue, I don’t see why Tuesday’s action should be excluded.
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