Saturday's Ranked Matchups Went Straight Sets. Honolulu Went Five.

The Sanford Pentagon is a basketball gym in Sioux Falls built to look like a barn from 1950, and on Saturday it hosted two matches between top-20 volleyball teams on the same floor on the same afternoon. Neither one reached a fourth set.

USC swept Arizona State 3-0. Arizona State was ranked twelfth coming in and USC twentieth, which is the sort of gap the poll insists is meaningful and the floor keeps declining to honor. The Sun Devils fell to 2-1. The Trojans left South Dakota unbeaten and, more usefully, left it having spent nothing.

Then Minnesota beat Creighton 25-18, 25-23, 25-12 on the same court. Read the third set again. Creighton had won a five-setter over Purdue on that floor the night before, a result we called the only outcome of Friday night that inverted the poll outright, and twenty-four hours later the Bluejays lost a set 25-12. Five sets in August are not free. Minnesota is 1-1 and Creighton is 1-1, and the fourteenth-ranked team just took the thirteenth-ranked team apart in straight sets without either of them being the story anybody planned to write.

In Las Vegas, Texas swept TCU, and the sweep is a lie. The first set at T-Mobile Arena went 30-28, which is fifty-eight points to settle one set, and the Longhorns needed 25-23 and 25-23 after that. TCU came in eighteenth and left 0-1 having lost three sets by a combined seven points. Texas is 2-1. A team that wins like that is winning the right way and also telling you something about its margin.

Nebraska handled its business on the same floor a few hours earlier, 25-18, 25-15, 25-16 over UNLV, clinical and short. The top-ranked team in the country spent Saturday doing precisely what it needed to and not one point more, because Saturday was never the reason Nebraska is in Las Vegas.

The only ranked team that got dragged to a fifth set on Saturday was the only ranked team that actually traveled to somebody's building. Baylor won at Hawai'i 25-17, 14-25, 25-22, 23-25, 15-9 inside the Stan Sheriff Center, which is roughly a nine-hour proposition from central Texas and about as far from a neutral floor as this sport gets. The Bears are 2-0. They also lost the fourth set 25-23 with a chance to end it and had to go win a fifth in a full building at the far edge of the Pacific.

That is the shape of the day, and it is worth stating plainly, because the sport has spent August selling the opposite. Neutral-site showcases in NBA arenas are a business decision, and they are a good one, and they produced three ranked-on-ranked matches on Saturday that all ended 3-0. A road trip to Honolulu is a volleyball problem. The seeding did not decide anything on Saturday. The building did.

Elsewhere the ranked teams mostly held. Kentucky swept South Florida at Memorial Coliseum and sits 3-1. Tennessee played twice at Food City Center and won both, needing 27-25 in the opening set against Fairfield to stay perfect at 3-0. Penn State swept UConn at Rec Hall. Texas A&M took the first set 26-24 from Cal Poly and then cruised. Colorado needed 27-25 in the second against Central Arkansas. North Carolina swept Davidson at John M. Belk Arena.

The ones who flew had to earn it. SMU won 3-1 at Moby Arena over Colorado State, taking the fourth set 27-25. BYU went four at Alico Arena against Florida Gulf Coast. Oregon dropped a set at Houck Field House to a Southeast Missouri State team that had lost its first three. Nobody who packed a bag on Saturday had an easy night, and nobody who stayed home had a hard one.

Which brings us to Sunday, which is the actual point of this weekend. Nebraska and Texas play at 3:30 Eastern on FOX from T-Mobile Arena, first against second, on a broadcast network, in August, before either team has a conference record or a full month of evidence. We flagged this one Tuesday as the loudest thing the sport has built for itself. It has not gotten quieter since.

It is also not the only ranked pairing on the card, or even obviously the best one. Wisconsin plays at Pittsburgh at noon Eastern on ESPN, sixth at fourth, in the same Petersen Events Center where the Badgers went 1-2 on Friday and Pitt kept doing what a top-five team should. Two and a half hours later Kansas meets Stanford in that same building, fifteenth against fifth. And USC gets Creighton back at the Sanford Pentagon, twentieth against thirteenth, with the Bluejays needing something after Saturday.

None of this was supposed to be the interesting part. The second weekend of a volleyball season is traditionally where good programs beat bad ones in half-empty gyms and everyone waits for October. Instead the sport has stacked its best pairings into August, put them in NBA buildings and on broadcast television, and dared the preseason poll to keep up. It has not kept up. Two days into the weekend, the thirteenth-ranked team has lost to the fourteenth, the twelfth has lost to the twentieth, and the eighteenth pushed the second to fifty-eight points in a set it still lost.

Four matches between ranked teams, one Sunday, three of them on national television. Saturday's three ranked matchups all went straight sets, which is a strange thing to be able to write about a weekend built specifically to produce chaos. Sunday will not be that tidy. It cannot be, not with a return trip to Pittsburgh and a rematch weekend at the Pentagon and the top two teams in the country meeting on a floor neither of them owns.