Match Thread - Michigan vs. PSU: Sat. 9-24-2022 7:00 p.m.

Well said, pennstate1973

I can’t really comment on how bad this was because I abandoned ship 12 points into the second set. Maybe I can gather myself to review the carnage tomorrow and attempt to assess the future outlook.

This was not the outcome I had planned for the Michigan Penn State match.

Good, I'm glad.
After the Stanford and Oregon wins I still thought they belonged in the 10-15 range in the rankings.
They will have their upsets and their ugly losses this season.
I still think PSU can beat Wisconsin and Nebraska, and yet lose to Northwestern or Maryland.
It's going to be one of those seasons.
I'll be satisfied if this team makes it to the 3rd round of the playoffs.

I missed that yesterday.  But it sure shows why they looked so bad against MI.  Anybody celebrating after the IND match has issues, absolutely nothing to be proud of in that match.   They played horribly against IND and back in the day, RR would have given them a 4 hr practice as a reward

I don't have any coaching attributes, knowledge or skill -- and I know you actually have coached volleyball at a pretty high level in England -- so my opinion is basically fact-free and this post is made with the understanding that you have alot more "street cred" than I do, but it's a message board, so here's my opinion.

I don't think you actually were advocating for Coach Katie to bench all the players in their last year of eligibility, and were only saying that move shouldn't be off the table, but in my opinion, it is not possible that Coach Katie will bench "all the players who will be gone in 2023."  First, it's not like the level of play of those players (Leisa Elisaia, Kash Williams, and Nasta Kudryashova) was significantly worse than the other players.  In fact, Kash had the best offensive performance (though still decidedly lackluster) on the team, with 9 kills.  Nasta came in as a sub (so she was already on the bench) and had 3 kills in 8 attempts with zero errors.  Objectively very good.  And Leisa was running all over the court all night to set passes that were way way off the net.  That needs to be taken into account when judging her performance.

I think there are four factors that probably explain the loss to Michigan.  First, Michigan appears to be a very good team.  Second, they played Rutgers the night before.  My guess is they devoted less time to prepping for Rutgers than they did prepping for Penn State.  Third -- the girls were "flat" or "overconfident" or whatever.  Against a very good team (like Michigan) complacency is not a good thing.  You need that edge.  Fourth -- and I definitely don't have the analytic skill to know whether this is true -- but isn't it possible that in addition to all the other factors, that Michigan's coaching staff did a better job preparing their team than Penn State's coaching staff did preparing theirs?  So maybe Penn State's staff simply had a "bad match."  I don't really know (and that assessment is complicated because of the Rutgers factor -- I think Michigan's staff could scrimp on prepping for Rutgers, and devote extra time to prepping for Penn State.)  

No doubt about it -- this was a dispiriting loss.  But Penn State had "good" wins against Stanford, Oregon and, as it turns out, LSU.  The concerning thing for me about this loss is not that it's against a mediocre team (it isn't), but that it's the third match in a row where Penn State hasn't performed all that well, even though it won two of those matches.  Something is a bit off.  I believe the coaching staff will fix things.  Time will tell.