Scoring the 2014 Women’s NCAA Psych Sheets: Georgia’s Depth Shows Through

With the release this morning of the uncut entry lists for the NCAA Championships, we’ve gone through and scored things as they’re seeded.

A note to make sure there’s absolute clarity: these lists released late Monday by USA Swimming are not official lists of who’s been invited to NCAA’s. They are lists of which three individual events, and relays, each team is trying to send to the meet, if the cuts fall in their favor.

See these lists here.

With that being said, the top 16 seeds in each individual event are about as sure of a lock as one can get, so scoring out those top 16 is possible, even before the psych sheets are cut.

First, let’s start with a reflective look. Psych sheet scoring is not infallible. It doesn’t take into account taper patterns, diving, and disqualifications or scratches.

What it is, however, is a good starting point perspective, so that during the meet, teams and fans sort of know where things stand, how their team is improving, etc. But they are pretty good. Last year, they correctly predicted both NCAA Champions (Georgia women, Michigan men). The year before, they were close, but not right on. Last year, they had the right top 10 teams in the wrong order, with a lot of the differences (but not all) explained by diving (Tennessee’s scoring difference was largely explained by diving, for example, and they were the really big mover). Below, we’ve done a comparison of the top 10 teams from last year’s psych sheet scoring to the actual outcome, for your viewing enjoyment.

We’ll break the scoring down a dozen different ways in the next two weeks, but to start, here’s a full list based on just swimming psych sheet scoring. We’ve put a (D) for teams that should expect a significant positive diving impact to their score – which there’s an increasing number of top programs on the women’s side who will be impacted.

Both Cal and Georgia can expect diving points, but Georgia’s should be more with two potential scorers and potential scorers in more events, as compared to Cal who is leaning heavily on Kahley Rowell in the platform.

On paper, Georgia has just under a 130-point advantage, plus whatever advantage they get in diving. That means that the Cal women have some catching up to do – because while Georgia lacks some of the star power they had when they won the title last year, the depth that they’ve developed is absolutely unbelievable. To illustrate that, we’ve included a count of the number of seeded scoring swims (including relays) in the far right-hand column.