Stanford Women vs Everyone Else Combined: Actually Kind of Close

SwimSwam’s editor Braden Keith brought me the following hypothetical: what would happen in a dual meet of the Stanford women vs every other team in the NCAA combined into one team. The answer is: Stanford would lose. The surprising part, is that they wouldn’t get crushed.

I scored out a dual meet using collegiate best times, swimming only, no relays, 3 individual events per swimmer (2 swimmers had to have events cut because they had 4 times fast enough to be in this super meet, Katie Ledecky, and Louise Hansson of USC). The score came to Not Stanford 134.5 Stanford 112.5. Stanford has an astonishing 8 swimmers that score more than the default minimum points. That is, there are no more than 2 Not Stanford swimmers with times better than their best time. Simone Manuel, Katie Ledecky, Ella Eastin, Janet Hu, Katie Drabot, Ally Howe, Brooke Forde, and Allie Szekely all pull this off in at least one event.

And yes, Simone Manuel is coming off an injury, so perhaps she can’t go quite those times right now (or perhaps she can, we’ll see), but that’s not the point. The point is just how ridiculous a pool of talent Stanford has accumulated. If we try the same experiment with men’s dynasty Texas, they get double up 168-79. Stanford is an elite breaststroker from winning.

Here are the results with some methodology notes below.

Results

Notes

• If we add in diving, this margin gets bigger. Stanford has an elite diver, but her best finish was 3rd on one board last year. Using both spring boards, diving comes to 30-8 for Not Stanford.
• I thought about including relays, but there wasn’t an obvious best solution of how to determine relay times.  Aggregates from each team (Stanford and Not Stanford) were one possibility. In this format Stanford loses every relay by a country mile. Perhaps this is the truest solution given this premise, but it doesn’t accurately represent the type of competition that Stanford is actually facing in the real world. The individual events in this hypothetical are actually reasonable approximations of what their swimmers have to face. Another option was to use team’s best times from previous seasons, but this required the use of splits from seniors that have since graduated. The third option was to use relay times from this season. This is problematic as teams have treated their in season relays with varying degrees of seriousness (Stanford hasn’t even competed in an 800 free relay yet this season- there are no qualifying time for Pac 12’s).
• I didn’t include any times from outside NCAA competition. This means any freshmen with really fast high school times aren’t credited here. Sometimes elite freshmen don’t miss a beat entering college (Ledecky). Sometimes there’s an adjustment period (ex. Beata Nelson). Due to that volatility, I don’t mind saving myself some research and excluding them.