2019 Men’s NCAA Predictions: How Did the Comment Section Do?

2019 MEN’S NCAA SWIMMING & DIVING CHAMPIONSHIPS

• Wednesday, March 27 – Saturday, March 30
• Lee & Joe Jamail Texas Swimming Center, Austin, Texas
• Prelims 10 AM / Finals 6 PM (Central Time)
• Defending champion: Texas (4x) (2018 results)
• Psych Sheet
• Live Stream
• Live results

While we’ve revisited our own official predictions for the 2019 Men’s NCAA Championships, there’s a whole other set of predictions that deserve a re-visit: yours, from the SwimSwam comment section.

As we did in our wildly-popular roundup article after the women’s NCAA Championships, we dug through the comment sections of our own stories to catalog fan predictions for the men’s NCAA meet, tallying up correct, partially correct and incorrect predictions. Here are a few guidelines we used:

• We searched the comment sections of all event previews, plus all five editions of our Power Ranks throughout the season. There’s no guarantee we got them all – many were compiled during the week leading up to the meet (a pretty busy time for our staff), and any comments left after the start of the meet were not included.
• Comments had to be specific enough for us to determine if they turned out to be true or not – though we tried our best to quantify most claims, including the infamous one: “ya’ll sleeping on…” When a commenter brought up a specific team or swimmer with “Ya’ll sleeping on…” or a similar phrase, we specified that prediction to mean that said team or swimmer would finish higher than what we’d predicted.
• We also tried our best to filter out obvious joke comments. Pretty much every Dean Farris prediction didn’t make our cut, since most of them were about events he wasn’t swimming. We also cut out a number of copypasta-type comments about a couple other athletes that certain commenters are trying to turn into the next Farris meme. (Because that’s what everyone in swimming is clamoring for: another weird running joke to try to explain to anyone outside the sport).
• An acknowledgement: the SwimSwam comment section as a medium is probably best for big, bold predictions. No one is going to comment “Lilly King will win the 100 breast.” (Well, someone actually did in our women’s edition. But we’re guessing that was mostly a joke). So a high rate of prediction success is probably not totally attainable.
• Another acknowledgement: we didn’t include usernames on these, except to give credit to the predictions we found the most prescient. This isn’t about embarrassing specific commenters for making predictions. (As a staff of writers who have to publicly make predictions with our real names, then deal with the wrath of the comment section when any of those predictions don’t come true, we wouldn’t wish that on anyone, much less our loyal readers and commenters). It’s more about seeing how the “prevailing winds” of the comment section were blowing pre-meet, and where commenters did have great insight vs. where their predictions faltered.

COMMENT SECTION PREDICTIONS:

• Success rate: 33.0% correct (down six percent from the women’s meet last week)

Best correct predictions:

• John Shebat will split 44 on butterfly in 400 medley relay – Samuel Huntington
  • This one gets extra credit for coming way back in November in our Power Ranks. Individually, Shebat had just gone a lifetime-best 47.9 in butterfly about a month before this comment. He wound up going 43.8 on Texas’s third-place medley relay.
• Shebat 3rd behind Seliskar, Vazaios in 200 IM – Swim Addict
  • Shebat predictions were the way to go, apparently. Swim Addict correctly predicted the top 3 in the 200 IM, especially impressive by including Shebat, who didn’t swim the event last year and was only the 8th seed.
• Alabama-Cal-NC State, in that order, all within 0.2 in the 200 medley relay – Swimmar
  • This one is outstanding: very specific and right-on. That was the exact finish order, and the spread was 0.21 seconds.
• Andrew Seliskar passes Finnerty in the second 100 to win 200 breast – JP Input is too short
  • This is how you predict right here: it’s unique and more specific than just “so-and-so wins.” It’s also informed, based off of 2018 results in that race, and it came perfectly true.
• Arizona will be top 20 as a team – Justin Wright
  • This one gets a little bump for being made by a current national teamer posting under their real name. That takes guts. The prediction also comes from way back in October, and when we went back and forth with Justin in the comment section, the discussion was both extremely respectful and very fact-based. And he made some great arguments for why Arizona would crack the top 20 – arguments that now look great in hindsight. Justin Wright, you have been vindicated.
• Harvard will be top 10 as a team. – Snarky
  • Another prediction from October. Well done, Snarky.

A lot of predictions got very specific this time around, adding up exact relay splits for projected composite relay times. And a handful of them were pretty accurate (though some were very, very ambitious in hindsight). Maybe the overall correct prediction numbers aren’t great from the comment section. But a good number of our commenters can be proud of how accurate they were with a few specific predictions here and there.

In in the interest of checking out prediction accuracy in hindsight, it’s also worth noting that our SwimSwam Official Picks entry into the Pick ‘Em Contest (made up of the picks from our event-by-event previews where most of these comments come from) finished 77th overall our of 674 entries. That’s not quite as good as our 7th-place finish on the women’s side, but still a solid result.

Here’s a look at all of the comment predictions we dug up: