NCAA Women's Volleyball Power 10 Week 3: Tennessee and TCU Step In, Penn State Steps Out — and the Data Gap in Between

On the night of September 21, I sat in front of a screen in Nagoya, waiting for the box score of the Penn State versus Tennessee match to load. The final line: Penn State lost 3-1. I scrolled down looking for the set scores — nothing. I looked for the unforced-error count for either team — nothing. The only thing that appeared was a line in the school's own recap: the defeat was pinned on errors that were not forced by the opponent.

Then, below it, a few individual numbers. Gabrielle Nichols, the setter: 38 assists, 12 digs. Ava Falduto: 15 digs, a team high. Another name, Ryla Jones, was mentioned but carried no stat line at all.

I stared at that sheet for a while. Fourteen years of covering sport have taught me one thing: an incomplete box score often tells you more than a complete one. When someone chooses what to show you and what to hide, that choice is already part of the story.

To understand why that box score mattered, it has to be placed inside its proper ecosystem — women's volleyball within the American university system, the NCAA. This is a completely different arena from the FIVB international circuit that Vietnamese fans know through the Olympics or the world championships. There is no four-year cycle, no cross-border transfers, no continental federation. Its rhythm is the annual fall season, running from late August to December, ending in a 64-team NCAA Tournament.

Within that system, the "Power 10" is a media product. It is a ranking hand-picked and updated weekly by an NCAA.com analyst, Michella Chester. It carries weight in public opinion and draws fan attention, but it does not determine tournament access and does not determine seeding. That authority belongs to the NCAA selection committee, based on the RPI index and direct evaluation. In other words, the Power 10 is a barometer of perception, not a selection mechanism. Confusing the two is the category error readers are most likely to make.

In Week 3 of this season, that barometer shook hard. Two teams entered the top 10: TCU and Tennessee. One team left: Penn State, which had been ranked No. 9 nationally. The immediate trigger was Penn State's 3-1 loss to Tennessee on September 21 — the very match whose box score I was waiting for that night. Tennessee was ranked No. 16 at the time.

What stands out: this was Penn State's first absence from the Power 10 this season, and also their first loss of the year to a ranked opponent. For a program that belongs to the "blue blood" tier of American college women's volleyball, dropping out of the top 10 after a single September loss is a signal worth pausing over — or worth doubting.

One more thing about the timing. Week 3 is the non-conference phase, before teams enter conference play, when the schedule is still relatively open. This is when "resume wins" are banked, because a win over a strong non-conference opponent can follow a team all season in the eyes of the selection committee. It is also the point at which rankings swing most violently, because the data sample is far too small to separate true strength from luck. One win can lift a team; one loss can drag one down. That sensitivity is the nature of this phase, not an exception.

Now let us go into the data, because that is where the real story lies.

In that defeat, Penn State had a standout individual pair. Nichols, at setter, recorded 38 assists along with 12 digs — her third double-double of the season. Falduto led the team with 15 digs. For a losing team, the setter having the second-highest dig total is an odd detail in a positive sense: it shows balls kept coming back at her, meaning rallies were long, meaning the back court was working hard. A team that loses while defending a lot is often a team that generated significant defensive volume but converted poorly in transition.

But that is all we have. No hitting efficiency, no block totals, no perfect-pass rate, no set scores, and most importantly, no specific error count for either side. Tennessee, the winner, does not even appear with a single stat line. This is an almost entirely one-sided dataset — Penn State's numbers, with nothing to compare them against.

Data does not lie, but the people who select data know very well how to lie. I have written this sentence many times, and each time it feels truer. Here, the dataset is filtered in a very clear direction: celebrating individual effort inside a collective defeat. Nichols with her third double-double, Falduto with 15 digs — those are pretty numbers, numbers that make people feel this team is fine, that it was just an off night. They function like frosting on a cake whose filling no one gets to taste.

What is notable is that Penn State's own recap called this loss a matter of "unforced errors" — mistakes not forced by the opponent. In volleyball language, that usually means serving errors and attacking errors at key moments, self-inflicted slips rather than an opponent playing too well. But that is a diagnostic label, not a tactical explanation. It does not say where the errors concentrated — serving, first-contact passing, or attacking. And it does not give a number. A labeled symptom is not a complete diagnosis.

I have tracked many box scores in my career, and I have learned a pattern: when a school writes its own recap of a defeat and reaches for the phrase "unforced errors", it is usually protecting a ranked program. It is a way of saying: we dropped this one ourselves, we were not beaten systemically. The difference between those two readings is enormous, and the published dataset — missing exactly the two things needed to verify it, set scores and error counts — does not let us adjudicate.

Set them side by side: a No. 9 team loses to a No. 16 team 3-1. If the set scores were all tight, the 23-25 kind, the story is a balanced match that Tennessee won on nerve at the decisive moments. If the sets were lopsided, the story is a collapse. We do not know which scenario we are in. That gap is no small detail — it is the entire foundation for every later conclusion. The absence of set scores means we cannot measure the true size of the shock, and that means every claim about a "rise" or a "decline" is hanging in the air.

There is another signal worth noting. Nichols had 12 digs, second on the team, and this was her third double-double of the season. For a setter, recording double-doubles repeatedly can reflect one of two things: either she is a rare all-around player, or the team is leaning on her all-around play to compensate for inefficiency in transition. Without team data, we cannot know which. But a soft dependency on the setter position is a risk I have seen in many volleyball teams: when ball distribution funnels through one person, opponents only need to read that person to read the whole system. A setter who must both create and dig heavily is a sign of a system patching itself up.

And then there is the name Ryla Jones, mentioned without a stat line. For an outside hitter, having no numbers in a recap of her own team's match is a detail worth noting — perhaps she played little, perhaps she was unremarkable, perhaps it was simply an editorial choice. But that absence, together with the complete absence of Tennessee's numbers, shows this is a dataset chosen to tell a story, not to analyze one.

Seen from another angle, this is not entirely the writer's fault. American college volleyball runs on its own media logic: every school has a public-relations office, and the post-match recap often serves the program's image. In that environment, a complete box score is not the default — it is something you have to go find elsewhere. The problem arises when readers, or worse, analysts, forget that and treat a curated dataset as a full picture.

I remember a time in Moscow, when I mispronounced a player's name three times during a semifinal and drew fierce backlash from viewers. I spent a month reviewing the footage and wrote a piece about how a player's name is a cultural battlefield. Moscow taught me this: getting lost is often the only way to find the right alley. The same applies here — that incomplete box score is not a dead end. It is an invitation to look for other sources, a reminder that every hasty conclusion stands on thin ground.

On the competition-system side, there is one detail worth remembering for Vietnamese readers: the Power 10 is not the mechanism that selects teams for the tournament. It is not like the FIFA ranking or the FIVB world ranking, which play a role in seeding and qualifying slots. The Power 10 is purely an editorial product, updated weekly by one writer. Because it is editorial, its volatility is far higher than the AVCA Coaches Poll or the RPI — things built on multi-match data and far more stable. Penn State's exit from the Power 10 is therefore a perception event, not a competition event. They lost a place in a perception ranking, not a tournament berth.

That said, it does not mean the September 21 defeat is unimportant. A non-conference loss to a strong opponent can still leave a mark on a team's RPI record, and the RPI is what the selection committee looks at when the season closes. This is the point fans often miss: the shock sits in the editorial ranking, but the real risk sits in the technical index. Penn State could return to the Power 10 next week, but the mark on their RPI record remains until they erase it with quality wins in conference play.

It is also worth adding a note on the long-term value of this story for the two rising programs. For TCU and Tennessee, the most valuable thing is not this week's ranking position, but the signal it sends to the athletic recruiting market. A place in the Power 10, even if it lasts only a week, is still a line that can appear in materials used to recruit young athletes. That value compounds over seasons rather than arriving instantly. Conversely, a big school like Penn State does not need one week in the top 10 to sell its program — it has an entire history for that.

At this point I want to say plainly what I think many have overlooked: both conclusions now circulating after Week 3 — Penn State declining, Tennessee rising to a new level — are being built on the same single brick.

That brick is one match.

In analysis, there is a very human temptation: when a result just happened, we want to assign it historical meaning immediately. Tennessee beat a top-10 team, so Tennessee "has entered the sport's top tier". Penn State lost and dropped out of the top 10, so Penn State "is on the way down". But both judgments are claims about a tier, and a sports program's tier is not decided by one September night. A "blue blood" program does not collapse after one loss; it merely undergoes a perception correction based on a single data point.

Tennessee's risk, by contrast, runs the other way: expectations pushed high after a win described as "resume-building". In NCAA women's volleyball, early-season "signature win" stories tend to fade fast once conference play exposes true levels. If Tennessee cannot sustain its efficiency against SEC opponents, that "top tier" label becomes an expectation debt rather than an asset. And if that happens, the very people cheering them today will be the first to ask questions.

I do not want to sound as though I am dismissing Tennessee. They won a real match against a real opponent, and that has value. But between "winning one big match" and "being in the top tier" lies a gap that only time and more matches can close. Week 3 of a season is when rankings are noisiest and most trustworthy at once — noisy because every result is exaggerated, and trustworthy because every team still has a full chance to prove it wrong.

There is one more point I consider more important than all the rest: the fact that TCU and Tennessee entered the top 10 at the same time shows that the Week 3 shakeup is structural, not a single-team anomaly. When two programs move in one week, it signals a phase in which the perceived order is being rearranged — something that usually happens early in the season, when teams have not yet revealed their full strength. But precisely because of that, early-season rearrangements are the most easily reversed. What is called a "new order" today may just be the noise of Week 3.

Listening to an empty stadium, I realized that noise was never the crowd. A ranking is the same. It is loud, it gets shared, it makes people argue — but it does not play a single match. What actually happens lies in the numbers that were never published, in the set scores that were skipped, in the errors no one counted.

The question I leave readers with is not whether Tennessee deserves it. It is this: if the Power 10 reverses next week, if Penn State returns and Tennessee steps out, how will we rewrite this story — and will we admit we read far too much into one September night?

Fans do not need a stadium; they just need something to believe in. That is why I write.