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Did ESPN2 Book the Wrong Two Matches?
It got one of them right. Texas A&M were ranked 19th and beat No. 4 Stanford in the nightcap, but the five-setter was No. 9 Texas at No. 8 SMU on ACC Network, in front of the largest crowd anybody published all night.
The answer turned out to be one of them. ESPN2 opened Wednesday night with No. 2 Pitt sweeping No. 17 Tennessee 3-0 and closed it with No. 19 Texas A&M beating No. 4 Stanford 3-1 at the State Farm Field House.
Fifteen ranking places separated the two teams in that second match and it went the wrong way, which is the entire argument for putting a match on a national channel in September. The first one was over in three sets.
No. 9 Texas at No. 8 SMU went five in Dallas on ACC Network. Those two were thirteen points apart in Monday's ballot, the narrowest gap anywhere in the poll, and 6,207 people watched it at Moody Coliseum.
Texas A&M Justified the Second Window
Texas A&M won 25-23, 25-13, 21-25, 25-19 and hit .344 as a team, a season best, with seven aces. Stanford hit .260 and had arrived 4-0.
Kyndal Stowers had 15 kills and 11 digs, Eliza Sharp a season-high 13, and Kirra Musgrove 44 assists and 11 digs for the first double-double of her career. It is the third top-five regular-season win of Jamie Morrison's tenure at Texas A&M.
Morrison, the Texas A&M head coach, in his school's own recap of the match.
It feels amazing. And I've been talking all season, we've got the pieces here, it's about putting them together in the right way. And I said when it clicks, it's going to be special. I think you saw that tonight.
Stowers, speaking to the same release, put the night on a week of practice rather than on the stage.
It's just the thing that literally Jamie said after the Indiana game. We all have to come in and we all have to do our part, and that's exactly what we did. We've been in practice every single day this week working on that and practice this week has shown that. So we just been talking about now that we've done it in practice, we have to be able to show everybody else. We have to go do it on a stage, especially against the No. 4 ranked team. That's huge. It's nothing that surprises us. It's everything that we've seen in practice and we were just able to actually display in the game.
Texas A&M were 3-4 on Wednesday morning and had been swept by Purdue eight days earlier. They are 4-4 now with a win over the fourth-ranked team in the country inside the record.
The Best Match Was in Dallas
SMU beat Texas 3-2 (25-21, 21-25, 25-22, 26-28, 15-10). The fourth set reached 28-26 and Texas won it, which bought them a fifth set and nothing else.
Suli Davis had 22 kills, 13 digs and four blocks for SMU, Favor Anyanwu 16 kills, eight blocks and five aces on .481, and Hannah Beauford 53 assists with 10 digs.
Torrey Stafford had 18 kills for Texas, Cari Spears 18 on a career high, Henley Anderson 15 on another, and Rella Binney a career-high 42 assists with 10 digs. Three career bests on the losing side is the shape of a fifth set.
Texas are 3-4 and have now lost to Arizona State, Nebraska, Louisville and SMU. SMU are 5-1, and both Texas A&M and Texas were ranked on the day SMU played them.
Nobody Published a Crowd for Either ESPN2 Match
SMU counted 6,207. Florida counted 3,032 for its sweep of Miami in Gainesville. Neither Pitt, Tennessee, Stanford, Texas A&M nor the event's own site has published a figure for the two ESPN2 matches, and we are not printing one we cannot source.
A neutral-site showcase not reporting its gate is ordinary rather than sinister. It does mean the only two crowds anybody counted on Wednesday were counted by teams playing at home.
Bella Lee, a third-year defensive specialist at Florida, on the crowd, to Florida Athletics.
It was a great atmosphere, that was one of the largest crowds we've played in front of this year. It just got us pumped up and made us play for something more.
Florida's 3,032 is the second-largest published gate of the night and less than half of Dallas.
Two Home Sweeps and a Four-Setter
No. 3 Kentucky swept No. 18 North Carolina 25-11, 25-19, 25-18 at Memorial Coliseum for North Carolina's first loss of the year, with Morgan Gaerte taking 17 kills on 34 swings and adding 11 digs.
No. 5 Louisville beat Missouri 3-1 at the KFC Yum! Center, where Nayelis Cabello set 59 assists. No. 14 Purdue swept IU Indianapolis in an hour and two minutes, the fastest match the programme has played in more than three years.
Fourteen of the sixteen matches across the two nights were played at somebody's home, which is the count the ACC gave when it announced the event in April. ESPN2 took the other two.
Stanford play No. 12 Penn State on Friday. Anything shorter than four sets there and Wednesday reads as a bad night rather than a problem.
