Athletes Unlimited – Initial thoughts

The Athletes Unlimited volleyball project finished its first round of matches on Monday. As a I write this, preparations are underway for the draft that will determine the teams for the second round of play.

Thoughts so far?

Personally, I only managed to take in a single match. That was the opener on Saturday. Why? Because it was the only one available to me seeing as I don’t currently have a subscription to a service that offers FS1, FS2 or CSB Sports Network. That means I can only watch the matches streamed via one of the AU’s social platforms.

Looks like I’ll be able to catch half of the ones happening this round.

Honestly, though, I wasn’t super engaged with the one I did tune in for. Kevin Barnett and Salima Rockwell did a good job announcing, as you’d expect if you’ve seen/heard them do matches before.

For me, it was more the novelty that drew me to tune in (while working on a research project) than any particular sense of fandom. I wasn’t routing for either team, nor really for any particular player. I think the latter is supposed to be the whole point, which is problematic if my perspective isn’t the minority one.

If you watched any of the play, I’d love to hear your thoughts and feelings.

Player rankings

Below is the top 10 for the player rankings after Week 1. One

Now here’s the Top 10 by stat points based on their player scoring system. Note that the Rank column indicates their rank based on Total points.

A concern I have is that MVP points are going to be biased toward point scoring players since it’s based on fan voting. That’ll be interesting to watch. Interestingly, though, so far they don’t seem to have much impact on the rankings.

Research ideas

I always have an eye for an interesting research idea, and this project has definitely stimulated some. One of the thoughts that occurred to me while watching that inaugural match had to do with the quality of play. Given how little time teams have together before playing, I’d expect them to play their worst in the first match and their best in the third. Of course, testing that hypothesis is challenged if/when there are line-up changes.

What about you? Any hypotheses you’d be interested in exploring?

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