Duke handed Pitt its first NCAA volleyball loss of the season on Sunday. Purdue upset Penn State in Rec Hall on Saturday. Hawaii stunned Cal-Poly on Friday. Conference upsets are common in NCAA volleyball. Yet with just about a month to go in the regular season, two spotless giants are ruling the sport's two premier conferences.
Minnesota (18-2, 12-0) is perfect against the rest of the power-packed Big Ten, which last week made up half of the AVCA poll top 10. The Gophers have dropped just two sets against Big Ten competition. Stanford (20-1, 12-0) has turned away all challengers in the Pac-12 and lost just four sets. Can either one of them post a clean sweep against their conference rivals and carry an air of invincibility into the NCAA tournament?
History says it's going to be tough. Penn State in 2009 was the last Big Ten team to finish the regular season without losing a match. The Nittany Lions went 38-0 that season and won their third straight national title in a run of four straight. In the Pac-12, you have to go all the way back to 2003 when the Pac-12 was the Pac-10. That's when USC compiled a 35-0 mark, which included a national title.
Stanford's Kevin Hambly can speak to the difficulties of navigating both the Pac-12 and the Big Ten because he coached at Illinois before being hired in Palo Alto two years ago.
His Cardinal are coming off weekend sweeps in Los Angeles, downing USC on Friday and UCLA on Sunday. Both the Trojans and the Bruins held set points in the third set of their matches before the Cardinal prevailed.
"The margins are really thin," Hambly said. "We've been fortunate that we've been able to play at a high enough level that it hasn't affected us -- yet. We're trying to get better and better to make sure that doesn't happen. But it's likely that it will. Not a lot of teams can go through their conference undefeated."
Facing the same opponent twice, even if your team has come out the victor in the first meeting, poses a different set of challenges, Hambly said.
"If you've beaten them once, you want to do the same game plan and think it will be the same," he said. "We try to look at it with fresh eyes and put a new game plan together."
Hambly said the grind of conference play is similar in the Big Ten where "anybody can beat anybody on a given night."
"For us here and when I was at Illinois, it's all about the NCAA tournament and trying to make a long run. The teams we play all present different challenges, and we hope we get those challenges resolved by the time we get to the tournament."
Nobody's handing out conference championship banners just yet, let alone regional bids, which go to the top four seeds. Just like the Panthers (23-1, 11-1 ACC) found out on Sunday in falling 3-1 to Duke (13-8, 7-5), stuff happens.
For Stanford and Minnesota, some pretty meaty matchups remain. The Golden Gophers go to Wisconsin (16-4, 9-3) on Halloween night (the Badgers are on a four-game winning streak and can spook any opponent inside UW Field House). Minnesota ends the regular season with four straight road matches, including Nov. 23 at Penn State (18-4, 9-3). Stanford plays its next four at home, where it hasn't dropped a match in nearly two years. A road trip to the Washington schools in November looms, but the Huskies (13-9, 5-7) have lost five straight and the Cardinal are 61-4 all time against the Cougars (17-5, 8-4).
"I'll be surprised if we're both unbeaten by the time we get to the tournament," Hambly said. "We're certainly going to do our best. Minnesota's got a lot of tough teams left and we've got a lot of tough teams ahead of us, too."
Elsewhere in conference play:
• Speaking of running the conference table, Kentucky (16-4, 10-0) is unscarred in the SEC. Perfection in the SEC isn't as rare as it is in the Pac-12 and Big Ten -- Florida was the last team to do so in 2014. The Wildcats have not completed a perfect conference season since 1988 when they won all seven of their regular-season matches and followed that up with a conference tournament title.
• As long as we're talking about conference unbeatens, BYU has never finished with a perfect mark in the six seasons the Cougars have been in the West Coast Conference. The Cougars (22-0, 12-0) have lost just one set in conference play thus far. With the Pitt loss over the weekend, BYU is the lone undefeated team in the nation.
• Cal-Poly (19-2, 9-1) saw its perfect mark in the Big West come to an end with a five-set loss at Hawaii on Friday. The Rainbow Wahine (14-6, 10-1) had not beaten a ranked team since a 2015 NCAA tournament victory over Penn State. The loss snapped the Mustangs' 18-match win streak and 26-match conference win streak.
• Purdue (19-4, 8-4) continued the craziness in the Big Ten, rallying by Penn State (18-4, 9-3) in five sets on Saturday for its first victory in University Park since 1982. Redshirt senior Sherridan Atkinson had a career-best 32 kills for the Boilermakers.