Swimulator Conference Projections: SEC

With more than half the season and all the mid season rest meets complete, it’s time to start looking ahead to conference meets. Today: the SEC(ACC, Big 10, Pac 12).

To project the meets, I’ve used SwimSwam’s Swimulator (available on the front page). This tool creates scores out a meet using top times so far this season (it can also do average times), while respecting plausible event combinations and trying to maximize each team’s points. It does not include diving. To get an idea of how we can expect these projected scores to change at the real meet, I compared last year’s projection as of today’s date to the real conference score at last year’s championship meet.

SEC Men

The SEC saw some wild point swings from the projection at this point last season. Missouri, the leader at this point last year, dropped 348 points to finish 5th. Florida, projected 3rd at this point last year, was 3rd and added 281.5 points to win. More so than the other conferences I’ve examined in this series, view the current Swimulator projection with a critical eye.

For example, Caeleb Dressel is currently only projected at 62 points. This is because at his mid season rest meet he only swam the 200 IM and 50 free. Swimulator won’t let him swim both of those events because they are back to back at a real championship meet. Instead it has him in the more realistic event combo of 50 free-100 free-100 fly. However, due to his unrested times in the 100 free and 100 fly he only projects to 30 points in those events. A realistic expectation would be at least 60 points between those two races.

Teams that took a big points jump are more likely to do so again the next year and visa versa for drop offs. Their philosophy for in season meets and training cycle timing generally remains consistent from year to year. An exception would be LSU. Last year they dropped off a lot at conference, but it would be surprising if they did so again this year. In the current projection they only have 41 individual points. This means that if they have a bad meet, there aren’t many points to drop and if they have a good meet, there are tons of points to gain due to their low seeds.

All that being said, Florida leads the current projection with 969 points. Combined with their history of point jumps at this meet, they’re the favorites at this point. Tennessee is a close second and gained a lot of points last year, but their mid season projection last year was less than half their current one. Their higher seeds this year aren’t coming from a bunch of freshmen either, it’s mostly returning swimmers, so them maintaining this position seems unlikely.

The leader in projected individual points is Hugo Gonzalez of Auburn with 96 points. He’s followed by Robert Howard of Alabama with 86 points, Mauro Castillo Luna of Texas A&M with 86, Brock Bonetti of Texas A&M with 82, and Mikel Schreuders of Missouri with 81.

SEC Women

The top of the SEC women’s projection looks very similar to last year. This year the top teams have 1248 and 1001 points. Last year at this time they had 1227 and 1007. The main difference is that the teams have traded places. Texas A&M leads Georgia this year, whereas Georgia led last year. Ultimately Texas A&M won last year’s meet by nearly 200 points. If we assume these teams approached their mid season meets the same way they did last year, Texas A&M should be the clear favorite. However there is a pretty obvious precedent for this type of lead being overturned. Diving was relatively even last year (A&M +22 over Georgia), and that seems likely to be repeated this year.

Projected individual scorers are led by Erika Brown of Tennessee with 96 points followed by Sydney Pickrem of Texas A&M with 90, Bethany Galat of Texas A&M with 88, Lisa Bratton of Texas A&M with 85, Asia Seidt of Kentucky with 84, and Megan Raab of Georgia with 83.

If you want to look at the event by event projections or more detailed swimmer points projections, follow the links to the full Swimulator projections.  Articles on other D1 conferences are forthcoming (here’s the ACC, Big 10, Pac 12, and some D3 conferences). In the meantime, if you want to know the projections for other conferences feel free to run your own custom projection here.