When Penn State Exits the Power 10: One September 21 Loss and What an Editorial Ranking Cannot Say About NCAA Women's Volleyball

I remember that evening. A large screen in a small Osaka cafe, a few international friends, and a US college volleyball match that none of them were really following. Penn State lost to Tennessee 3-1 on September 21. In the report I read afterward, the phrase "unforced errors" was placed on top as the sole explanation for the defeat of a No. 9 team by a No. 16 team.

People see the goals; I see the silence before they happen. Here, the silence sits between a confident headline and a box score nobody bothered to print in full. Because what made me stop was not the 3-1 scoreline. What made me stop was what was absent from the story: no set scores, no specific error counts, no single statistical line from the opponent. A match told with half a dataset, and from that half, an entire national ranking system moves.

That is why I want to write this piece. Not to argue whether Penn State should stay in or leave the Power 10. But to talk about how we read women's volleyball, and about the widening gap between an editorial ranking and the truth on the court.

Context: A system that does not run on the Olympic calendar

Let me say one thing immediately that many international volleyball followers get wrong. This is a story from the US collegiate ecosystem — the NCAA — not the FIVB system with its Olympic cycles, continental qualifiers, or international transfer market. NCAA women's volleyball does not sit on the four-year Olympic cycle. Its rhythm is the annual fall season, running from August to December, ending with a 64-team NCAA Tournament.

Here, the third week of the season is the non-conference phase — matches outside a team's regional conference schedule. This is when teams are still testing lineups, still building resumes, and also when rankings swing most violently. One win can put a program on the map. One loss can make people forget that three weeks earlier that team was still in the top 10.

A key point I must stress, because most readers outside this system misunderstand it: the so-called "Power 10" is not an official ranking. It does not decide NCAA Tournament access. It does not decide seeding. That authority rests with the NCAA selection committee, based on the RPI index and eye-test evaluation. The Power 10 is curated by a single analyst — Michella Chester — and published weekly on NCAA.com. It is an editorial product, personal in nature, with its own rhythm, and volatile by design.

In other words, when Penn State "exits the Power 10", that is a perception event, not a competition event. And precisely because that boundary is fragile, I think this story needs to be dissected carefully. Because even if the ranking itself carries no official power, an early-season loss like the one on September 21 can still scar an RPI resume. The downstream effect is real, even if the headline is only temporary.

What is actually being recounted

Let me retell the facts through the eyes of someone sitting in the press room, not standing at the sideline. Penn State, ranked No. 9, lost to Tennessee, ranked No. 16, by 3-1. Penn State's own recap — not a third party's — blamed the loss on unforced errors. Tennessee received the description "resume-building" and was soon placed in "the sport's top tier." TCU also joined the top 10. Penn State exited for the first time this season.

In the report, we get three individual stat lines. Gabrielle Nichols, setter, posted 38 assists and 12 digs — her third double-double of the season. Ava Falduto led the team with 15 digs. And Ryla Jones, outside hitter, was named without a single accompanying stat line.

I sat with those three lines of data for a while. And I realized what unsettled me was not the number. It was the silence around the number.

Analysis: When a diagnosis is mistaken for an explanation

I have spent eight years covering women's volleyball, most of it doing tactical note-taking rather than writing impressions. That work taught me something simple: an unforced error is a symptom, not a cause. Saying a team lost because of unforced errors is like saying a patient has a fever because his temperature is high. Accurate as a phenomenon, meaningless as a diagnosis.

The real question is: where did the errors concentrate? In serving, in attacking, or in first-contact reception? A team that loses because of serving errors is often a team accepting high risk to create pressure. A team that loses because of attacking errors at key moments is often a team blocked by the opponent's defensive system, or losing composure when the score tightens. A team that loses because its first-contact reception collapses is often a team whose attacking structure breaks at the root. These three causes require three completely different fixes. The report does not tell us which situation applies.

Based on my experience watching matches, when a team writes its own recap and chooses the phrase "unforced errors," it usually signals serving errors and attacking errors in decisive rallies — mistakes of its own making, not pressure from the opponent. This is a deliberate word choice, and it shields the team from a harder question: did Tennessee actually beat them on merit, or did Penn State beat itself?

I do not have enough data to answer. And that is exactly the problem.

Because when a team chooses how to tell the story, it also chooses how to stay silent. The communications staff of a college sports program has a mission anyone in the trade understands: protecting the program's reputation after a defeat. The most common method is to highlight impressive individual stat lines and omit poor collective data. A setter with a double-double, a libero with 15 digs, an outside hitter named — those are bright spots enough to fill a recap.

But in volleyball, individual statistics can never tell the collective story. A libero with 15 digs does not only say she defends well. It can also say her block is leaking, that balls keep piercing through and forcing her to dig from desperate positions. In a loss, a high dig count is often a sign of a defensive system working overtime, not of excellence.

Likewise, Nichols's line of 38 assists and 12 digs deserves a closer look. It is her third double-double of the season. A setter logging that many digs means she was both distributing to the whole team and leaving her position to save balls that got past the block. In a loss, this number tells two truths at once: Nichols is Penn State's operating axis, and the block in front of her is exposing gaps. We have no team dig total, no block-success rate, so we cannot determine what is cause and what is effect.

A structural note worth marking: Nichols appears to be a soft point of dependency at the setter position. She is the primary distributor, carrying both the defensive and the organizational load. When a team relies on its setter to both create and dig, it usually signals an unsettled block and a not-yet-smooth transition system. In other words, Penn State may be playing with a structure dependent on an individual at the most important position on offense, and that only surfaces when the opponent is strong enough to exploit it.

Data: The biggest gap lies in the blank spaces

I want to speak plainly about this dataset, because I believe one of the biggest problems in sports journalism today is the tendency to treat missing data as neutrality. It is not neutral. It is biased.

The dataset we have is almost entirely one-sided. We have Penn State's statistics. We do not have Tennessee's. We do not have set scores. We do not have specific error counts. We do not have attack-success rate, block-success rate, or perfect-pass rate. We have no efficiency metrics at all.

Let me be clear about the consequence. The two most important facts for testing the "lost because of unforced errors" hypothesis are the set scores and the specific error counts. Neither exists. That means the central hypothesis of the story cannot be verified from the source itself. We are being asked to trust a conclusion with no way to check it.

Without set scores, we cannot know whether this defeat was a balanced match — say, 23-25 sets — or a comprehensive loss. This is the most serious gap, because it determines how we assess Tennessee. If the sets ended on two-point margins, Tennessee's win is the product of composure in decisive rallies. If the margins were large, it is a match Tennessee dominated. These two scenarios lead to two completely opposite conclusions about whether Tennessee deserves the "top tier" position.

The fact that the winning team has no stat line at all is also a problem. Tennessee won, but we do not know how. Who scored for them? What tactics did they impose? What weaknesses of Penn State did they exploit? In any serious analysis, the first question is always: what did the opponent do to win? Here, that question is not asked, and therefore the answer does not exist.

On sample size, we are talking about a single match. One match is never enough to reach durable conclusions about a team. It can be a signal, a hint, a question mark. It cannot be a verdict. And pushing Tennessee to the "top tier" or dropping Penn State out of the top 10 based on one match is a kind of over-reading I see repeated every season.

Contrarian angle: The ranking shakes, the quality does not

At this point, I want to step away from the specific story and talk about something larger. Because the Penn State story is just one example of a systemic problem in how we consume women's volleyball.

Imagine two parallel systems. One is the Power 10 — curated by a single analyst, published weekly, reacting to every result, highly volatile by design. The other is the NCAA Tournament selection system — based on RPI, based on committee evaluation, operating on a much larger dataset and changing more slowly. These two systems are not synchronized. They measure two different things with two different yardsticks.

The problem arises when readers mistake one for the other. When Penn State exits the Power 10, part of the public reads it as a statement about team quality. But it is only a statement about one analyst's perception in one specific week. The Power 10 shakes because it is designed to shake. That shaking does not reflect a real collapse on the court.

The same is true in the opposite direction, and this is the truly counter-intuitive point. Describing Tennessee as having entered "the sport's top tier" is not a tactical conclusion. It is an editorial statement based on a single win, with no supporting data. In the history of US college women's volleyball, these "signature wins" appear abundantly early in the season and fade very quickly once conference play begins. When every team has played everyone else, when the RPI stabilizes, evaluations based on one match rarely hold.

I remember another evening. In 2026, during the Russia World Cup, I sat in front of a large screen watching Spain face Iran. Spain held 74 percent of possession but managed only two shots on target, an unusual figure for their tiki-taka style. Most people around me called it a boring match. I saw a lesson that controlling space does not mean controlling the ball. And I started counting passes myself, tracking receiving positions, instead of trusting the available stats. The minute of control is where my heart learned to beat slower in a burning Moscow.

That lesson applies directly here. When you count for yourself, you discover things the recap does not say. 74 percent possession hides a stalled attack. 15 digs hide a leaking block. A setter's double-double hides a dependent system. A shaking ranking hides that team quality hardly changed in a single week.

The truth is, what is being misread here is not Penn State or Tennessee. What is being misread is the speed of conclusion. We conclude about a season in its third week, based on one match, from half a dataset. And we call it analysis.

What the transfer season teaches about resumes and roles

We are in a transfer cycle, and that makes me think about another dimension of this story. In US college volleyball, there is no international FIVB-style transfer market, but there is an implicit market operating through program reputation. A program perceived as "rising" has a real advantage in recruiting young talent. A program perceived as "declining" loses that advantage.

And here is where the Power 10 has influence beyond intention. Even without official power, a place in the Power 10 is a line of text on a screen that families weighing college choices will see. A top-10 place is a market signal. When Tennessee enters the top 10, they receive an intangible asset whose value only becomes visible in the enrollment cycles months later. When Penn State exits, they lose part of that asset, even though team quality has not changed.

Every transfer is a story of leaving — I listen to the silent cries too. And at the collegiate level, every time a program leaves the spotlight, that is a small story of leaving as well. A prospective recruit stops calling. A ranking stops mentioning your name. A local paper stops writing about you. These things do not appear on the court, but they appear in a family's decision.

I am not saying the Power 10 creates or destroys programs. I am saying attention is a scarce resource, and in women's volleyball — where coverage is already far lower than the men's — attention is scarcer still. Every small shift in the flow of attention carries weight. That is why I want to talk about caution when journalism gets excited about a single win. That excitement has value. It also has a short half-life.

Governance and the category trap

There is no governance story in this source. No rule disputes, no sanctions, no eligibility issues. Compliance risk is negligible. What I want to spend a few lines on is not a violation but a category confusion.

Mistaking the Power 10 for the official selection system is a category error, and it has analytical consequences. If you believe the Power 10 is a ranking with power, you will read Penn State's exit as a punishment. If you understand it is an editorial product, you will read it as a perception swing. These two readings lead to two different conclusions about the same fact.

The responsibility to distinguish falls on us — the journalists. When we report on an editorial ranking without stating its nature, we inadvertently plant a false belief in readers' minds about how the system works. And in a women's sport where power structures are already faint in public perception, clarifying these structures is not a technical detail. It is a condition of understanding.

I learned this the hard way. In 2026, at the Kansai Queen Cup semifinal, I was the only reporter from the new Osaka online outlet. The match between INAC Kobe Leonessa and Urawa Red Diamonds Ladies at Noevir Stadium had a total of three women reporters in the press area — two doing video, and me alone taking tactical notes. In the second half, the press-area steward told me I was "sitting in the wrong seat," though my credential clearly specified it. I ended up standing in the corridor for all of extra time, and witnessed Emi Nakajima's 25-meter free kick in the 109th minute that sent Kobe to the final.

The hidden chair did not make me fall; it taught me how to stand firm in the press room. After the match, I wrote about the distraction of the seating dispute rather than analyzing tactics, and spent the following three weeks reviewing all the footage to fully understand Kobe's 4-4-2. From then on, I began noting everything on the margins — seat numbers, organizers' attitudes, camera positions. Because these things reflect the health of the women's game, and they usually vanish from the report.

Silent volleyball and the data gap

In 2026, when the pandemic paused competitions, I had just entered the trade at a sports media company in Osaka. I was the newest hire, and the only one assigned to women's sports. In September, the Nadeshiko League restarted, and I was at Yanmar Stadium Nagai for Cerezo Osaka Yanai against Chifure AS Elfen Saitama, in front of a crowd of only 150 people permitted under the rules.

The whole stadium could only hear the coach shouting, the ball touching grass, players calling each other's names. I suddenly discovered that visiting side Chifure was pressing 4-4-2 from the first 30 seconds, and I could hear the captain center-back's commands clearly — something a noisy stand never allows. I requested a Zoom interview with the Chifure coach and wrote a long piece about how a team reads the opponent's positions through on-field communication sounds.

When the stands are empty, I hear more clearly the heartbeat of the players running. And in today's story, there is a similar silence. No set scores, no error counts, no opponent statistics — that is an empty stand in the data. I can hear the story happening, but I cannot see it. And a tactical note-taker should never conclude from what he only half-hears.

Where the real risk lies

If I had to bet on one risk, I would not bet on Penn State. Penn State's risk is not leaving the Power 10. It lies in the RPI resume — an early non-conference loss to a ranked opponent can hurt a selection resume later, even if the Power 10 itself carries no power. That is a technical scar, healable with quality wins in conference play.

Tennessee's risk is the reverse. It is the risk of inflated expectations. A signature win creates a new expectation level, and if Tennessee cannot sustain efficiency against conference opponents, the gap between the "top tier" position and reality becomes pressure. Historically, programs thrust into the spotlight too early pay the price with harsher scrutiny when things get difficult.

And the biggest risk — the highest-probability one — belongs to no team. It belongs to us, the readers. The risk is that we over-read an editorial swing in the third week. The risk is that we turn a commentary product into a competition verdict. The risk is that we forget that behind every headline, there is a fuller box score that someone chose not to print.

What I will be tracking

I will track the fourth and fifth weeks of the ranking. If Tennessee holds or exits, that will partly confirm or deny the "top tier" claim. I will track Penn State's conference results — if they return to the top 10, the September 21 loss is a stumble, not a decline. I will track Tennessee against SEC opponents, where sustained efficiency is the real measure. And I will look for the full box score of the September 21 match, because the set margins will tell me the true magnitude of this upset.

Silent football still has a sound: the breathing of belief. Volleyball too. When a ranking shakes, the loudest noise does not come from the court. It comes from the rooms where people are hastily rewriting the story of a season that is only three weeks old.

I write from the corner of the forgotten room, so that those who are forgotten have a place to stand. And in this case, the forgotten one is the match itself — with its uncounted sets, its unclassified errors, and a winning opponent never recounted on how they won.

What I carry with me

As the season continues, I will remember that one week is not a season, one match is not a team, and an editorial ranking is not a verdict. Not because I want to diminish the value of what is happening. Tennessee won a real match, on a real court, and that deserves recognition. TCU did something to enter the top 10, and that deserves recognition too.

But recognition should not be confused with sanctification. The most beautiful thing about US college women's volleyball is that it self-corrects. It has a long season, a brutal conference schedule, and a selection committee that looks at the whole season rather than one week. Hasty conclusions get tested by time, and most of them get adjusted.

That is why I believe in reading slowly. In a media environment that rewards speed, reading slowly is a small act of resistance. It requires us to wait for the full box score, to wait for the set scores, to wait for the opponent's statistics, to wait for conference play to begin. It requires us to accept that there are things we do not yet know, and that admitting this does not make us weaker but more accurate.

For women's volleyball — a sport still fighting for attention and resources — accuracy is not a luxury. It is a form of respect. Respect for the athletes who spent a whole season building something, only to be judged on a single match. Respect for programs trying to rise. And respect for readers who deserve more than an emotional headline.

When next week's ranking is released, everything may reverse. Tennessee may exit. Penn State may return. And this week's "systemic shift" story will dissolve as if it never existed — until another match appears and everything shakes again.

I will still be here, taking notes from my corner, waiting for the full box scores. Because the truth of women's volleyball does not lie in what is ranked. It lies in what is played. And what is played, for the most part, is still waiting to be counted properly.