Match Thread: Wisconsin vs. Penn State 10-2-19 9:00 p.m. ET

What messed up this set was the 3-4 service errors at the beginning of the set when we could have stayed even with WISC and instead just gave back the serve to WISC. Oh well. Wait till next year. Tho, I think the PSU will have a big incentive for the match at the end of the season.

Fair point, but how can you fault anyone for hoping for salvation.

To put a painful point on it: 1) career high kills for Loberg (21), first time Wisconsin ever beat Penn State back-to-back (they won last season) and 13 points is fewest points Penn State ever scored against Wisconsin.

I caught up with Coach Rose briefly before he headed out of the Field House.  I noted that several "coaches in the stands" thought he should have taken one of his two timeouts sooner in the second set, and asked what his thinking had been.  Here's his answer:

Coach Rose: I also probably could have thought there was reason to challenge calls too, but we'd had a five-point lead, and we gave two or three points away with bad serve-reception. When you're at 17 or 18, you still have to get to 25. Both of us used a media timeout at 15. The timeouts came late in that game. The big problem is we missed a serve at 22-21 and then got aced. So we went from leading 22-21 to trailing 23-22. So that's the problem -- late in a game you can't afford to miss a serve, and then not even go for a serve. That's a four-point swing that ends up causing you more problems than anything else. Had I called a timeout earlier I wouldn't have had a timeout there, and the timeout there was far more important. It's still early in the season, and it's important for the team to understand how critical those sorts of errors are. It was a disappointing end to the second game."  

We may.  And it is true that the passing has to be good.  But in some recent matches the middles just haven't gotten going even when the passing has been pretty good.  Not sure whether the problem is the setting, the middles or both.  I almost get the idea that the Stanford match was a fluke. It seems that Russ may think the problem is the setting as he said after one match that Gabby had to improve.  I'm not a good enough observer to know where the problem lies. But if the middle connection becomes consistent by the end of the season, PSU will be a force to be reckoned with in the NCAA tournament.

I know that PSU is a pretty good team.  But I'm wondering if the PSU team that was so up for the match against Stanford that they played really good, but don't have the experience/skill to play that way consistently.  It's sort of how a lot of teams play PSU.  Because PSU has been good for so long, teams play at a high level against them because for these teams, beating PSU would make their season.  But these teams play poorly against other teams because they can only play at that high level because of emotion and can't play that way consistently against all teams. I was so hyped after that match.  But now I'm coming to realize that that wasn't the real PSU team. They're somewhere at a lower level.