The list of issues with the AVCA poll are many, from some members submitting secret ballots, to some ballots being submitted by other than coaches, to some ballots containing obvious mistakes, to some ballots showing obvious bias, and perhaps the worst feature of the poll being that there is no stated standard for how coaches are to rank teams. Are they to rank by weekly performance? cumulative performance to date? multi-year history of superior performance? where they think teams will rank by end of the regular season? by how they think they’d perform in the tournament? The AVCA Poll is a fun thing for the fans and media to toss around. It supports marketing, and provides teams having a good season a way to help drive regular season press coverage and ticket sales, and that is all it is good for.

It’s clear in the NCAA Championship manual how much weight they give to the AVCA and its totally subjective and flawed poll. “AVCA” and “Poll” appear zero times in the DIV I Championship Manual. OTOH, RPI appears 24 times. RPI has its flaws, but it is the top selection tool because it is a completely objective algorithmic based criteria.

The language in the current Manual is much more precise than the language used in the last decade. You are right. Polls such as the AVCA’s and rankings such as Pablo’s are not mentioned as evaluative tools.

However, the door is not entirely slammed shut on polls and non-NCAA RPI rankings. Should the Women’s Volleyball Committee fail to reach an agreement after using all of the stated evaluative tools, it can consider input from regional advisory committees. Yes, these regional advisory committees can be called upon as a “last resort” — as if their advice are irrelevant except when there’s a dire situation.

There is nothing written in the Manual about what “input” here includes and excludes, and thus does not prevent these regional advisory committees from introducing (for example) the AVCA Coaches Poll as a criteria for consideration. Facts will determine the arguments being made, but I can see a situation where one line of argument could be so-and-so bubble team won X times while the other bubble team won only Y times against a then-ranked AVCA top 25 team.

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Aside: I look forward to the day when the NCAA D1 Volleyball Committee seed 64 teams instead of just 16.

https://ncaaorg.s3.amazonaws.com/championships/sports/volleyball/d1/women/2019-20D1WVB_PreChampManual.pdf

See section 2.2 and following

100% agree with your second statement: “RPI is by far the most important factor,” and in fact the RPI is the only tool actually put out by the NCAA so it stands to reason that an NCAA tool would be given far more weight by the NCAA than anything else — including private polling organizations such as the AVCA polls which the NCAA has no input concerning their methodology.