Coming off an absolutely CRAZY weekend in women’s tennis (and in Winterfell), I figured it was fitting to post the third installment in the Competitiveness serious. Today, we’ve decided to take a quick trip down memory lane. We on the women’s side of the Blog have been talking A TON about how this year feels SO much more competitive this year versus the recent past (and this weekend, surely, was a true testament to that). However, we decided to actually dig into it and see if this is actually the case, or if we’re just inflating the excitement of a few upsets in our minds. To do so, we looked back on the past 5 seasons (2015 – 2019) in an attempt to really analyze whether there have been more upsets and close matches this year versus the past. With the help of Analyst, our super stud data gal, we gathered all the information on upsets and close matches for the past 5 years and took a look. And we found some interesting and unexpected things!
Before we dive into our findings, I want to just lay out a few quick items. We have limited our data collection to ranked teams only. We have made note of any and all upsets that happened each year. We defined “upset” as a lower ranked (or unranked!) team beating a higher ranked team, based on the ITA year-end rankings (I acknowledge this is imperfect, but alas). Because the rankings are, for the most part, done in an attempt to minimize how many upsets exist in the rankings, our so-called upsets serve almost as a record of how “messy” a year was in trying to rank teams. In addition to looking at upsets, we also wanted to look at how many close matches happened each year, so we made note of all 5-4 matches and recorded the rankings of the teams involved in those battles (even if the match did not result in an upset). I’d also like to note that we considered using UTRs as a way to look at competitiveness, but ultimately decided that UTRs are more individual-focused and less a reflection of a team’s performance during a given year, so we stuck to ITA rankings as our baseline for expected team results.
Ok, now I’ve been rambling for too long, so let’s get to the interesting bit!
The top-tier teams this year aren’t untouchable
One major factor driving our endless conversations about crazy upsets and competition this year has to do with the fact that top tier of teams in the rankings no longer seem untouchable, as they usually did in years past. We’ve seen that teams in the top-10 are susceptible, and not just to other top-10 teams. We’ve seen upsets in which a team outside the top-10 beats a top-10 team. And we’ve seen top-10 teams come away with narrow 5-4 victories over teams ranked significantly lower, including #1 over #12, #5 over #11 and #12, #9 over #29, and #10 over #16. In years past, there were definitely upsets involving the top-tier teams, but the upsets remained between teams in this same tier. Now, we have more “outsiders” coming in and really challenging the top teams, which has made for an exciting season up to this point. In year’s past, there was also a top of the top tier that separated itself from the rest. I would argue that Emory, CMS, Middlebury, and Wesleyan could be considered in a class of their own this year, but after the madness this weekend, Emory’s near loss to Chicago has us questioning that.
We are seeing a lot of close matches among the “second tier” teams
If we slide out of the top 10 or so teams and look at what I would call the next “tier” of teams, we see a lot more movement and competition this year. Just with those 8 teams between 13 and 20, there have already been 8 upsets and 22 5-4 matches, and all but one of the upsets was with a team either higher than #13 or lower than #20. That is a lot of upsets and close calls if you ask me. By this point, we acknowledge that we can’t predict the outcome of any matchups between teams in this tier, and it just adds to the excitement that these teams have demonstrated that they can challenge the teams ranked above them.
There’s a bigger gap in ranking between teams having close matches
Numbers are fun so let’s look at some numbers. For every 5-4 match, we looked at how far apart in ranking the two teams were. For example, for a 5-4 match between #14 and #10, the ranking difference would be 4 (regardless of which team won). If a team is unranked, they were assigned a ranking of #41. Then for each year, we averaged these differences in rankings both for all of the 5-4 matches. This basically tells us, on average, when a close match occurred in a given year, how far apart were the two teams in the rankings? In theory, when the teams are further apart in ranking, the playing field is more level. And what’s interesting is that this year we’re seeing that 5-4 matches are happening between teams ranked further apart than ever before. 5-4 matches are happening between teams that are, on average, ranked close to 8 spots apart in the rankings, whereas the highest it’s ever been before is 6.5. This is something we should revisit at the end of the season once the year-end rankings come out and all matches are done, but it’s one example of numbers supporting our claim that there is more parity among DIII teams this year.
2015 and 2016 were in some ways MORE competitive than this year
Okay, so I know we all sound like broken records saying how competitive this year is, but what if I told you 2015 and 2016 were in some respects MORE competitive? Can you imagine how annoying we would’ve been back then?! Anyways, those years not only saw a lot of upsets, but a ton of 5-4 matches. 2015 takes the cake for having the most 5-4 matches of the past five years, and 2016 wins for having the most upsets (I’m sure the rankings committee loved trying to figure out 2016). Anyways, it seems like all D3 tennis fans were on the edges of their seats for two straight years as teams of all levels battled one another to the bitter end. The top 10 played so many tight matches with each other, and as can be predicted, some of those 5-4 matches ended up being upsets given how close all the teams were in ability and talent. There was definitely still clear tiering in those years (grouped as: top 10, 10-25 and 25-40), but within each tier, any team was a huge threat. And even outside of that, we saw a number of lower ranked teams come up and really challenge some top 10 teams.
2018 maintained the status quo
I think this one possibly speaks the most to the fact that we think this year is so crazy competitive. If we look at last year, there were a few “upsets” and close matches amongst the top 4 teams (CMS, Emory, Williams and Midd), but everyone knew how tight and talented those teams were, and together, they were untouchable by any other teams. If we look at all 20 teams who ended last year ranked anywhere from #5 to #24, there were a grand total of 4 upsets. There were still a decent number of 5-4 matches among the teams in this range, but few were actually converted into upsets. The rankings committee must have loved 2018. The bottom tier in the rankings (about #25-#40) was actually where we saw a majority of the upsets last year, with there being 7 upsets between teams in that range, and 6 upsets of unranked teams beating those teams. This pattern is hugely different than what we’ve been seeing in 2019, where we have a lot of craziness in the top-25. Essentially, most teams played to their ranking, and the status quo seemed very intact. Because of this, now when we hear of more upsets coming through this year, they really stick out in our minds. Last year was predictable to a fault, and now it feels like truly anything could happen. I guess it’s all just relative to our most recent memory.
This year’s Wash U team wins the award for most 5-4 matches
Us bloggers have talked quite a bit about this year’s Wash U team. They have overall been having a down-year and struggled to perform consistently. In fact, their current team has played seven 5-4 matches (wins or losses), which is the most of any team in the past five years. I only found two other teams (Bowdoin’s 2015 team and Kenyon’s 2017 team) which had played six in a single year. I don’t have any particularly insightful commentary here, I mostly just wanted to share this fun fact and give Wash U a shoutout.
Phew, that was a wall of text, but we hope you got something out of it. I love when Analyst puts together this cool data stuff – it’s so different for me, but really exposes some interesting stuff about the tennis we all love and watch obsessively. As always, let us know your thoughts! And if you find yourself so interested in this kind of stuff and wanna join the dopest girl squad out there, feel free to email or DM any of us!