Virginia Women, Texas Men Lead Scored Out Mid-Season NCAA Championships

The NCAA championship season is fast approaching, and as evidenced by all the major contenders on the men’s side making last-minute, high-impact roster additions, the focus has shifted fully to the NCAA Championships in March.

So, to get an early look at where things stand ahead of conferences and the cut lines being published, we’ve scored the 2025 NCAA Championships based on times swum before Jan. 21, 2025. These results have some key limitations—mainly that they do not include diving, which is where the Indiana men will pick up major ground against their competitors —so they are less predictive and more a look at the state of play in January. We’ll discuss the other limitations below, but these results largely confirm what we’ve seen throughout this season. The Virginia women are on their way to a five-peat at women’s NCAAs and the Texas men’s fast early season results have put them in the driver’s seat of a competitive men’s race.

Women

Men

Before we go any further, let’s discuss how we arrived at these numbers. Our data is sourced from USA Swimming, and we selected the top 21 swimmers in each event based on times recorded before January 21, 2025. USA Swimming accepts converted times, so these rankings include times from the 2024 Short Course World Championships.

To simulate an NCAA Championships, we scored the top 16 and limited each swimmer to three individual events. Some swimmers are ranked to score in more than three events, which required us to make judgment calls on which events they would compete in. We decided to use each swimmer’s three highest-ranked events and attempted to keep them to one event per day when possible. Swimmers will undoubtedly make different choices than we did as March approaches. Most notably, using the highest rank as the deciding factor keeps Josh Liendo in the 200 fly instead of the 100 freestyle, where he is the defending NCAA champion.

We scored relays but weeded out any teams that didn’t have a qualifying standard in at least one event, which is how most teams qualify relays for the championships. So, there aren’t 16 scoring teams in each relay, though there will be for conferences. It’s also important to keep in mind Virginia doesn’t swim the 800 free relay until conferences, so even though the women have a commanding lead in this simulation, there are still points on the board for them. Finally, we did not break any ties.

Again, diving is not included in these scores.

With these limitations in mind, what can these simulated NCAA Championship results tell us?

Women

As expected, Virginia is in control on the women’s side, with Texas looking like a solid choice for another runner-up finish. The Longhorns are the only women’s team other than Virginia to amass more than 400 points from this exercise. Stanford sits on a bit of an island in third place with 358 points after confidence-boosting first-semester results from Torri Huske, Lucy Bell, Caroline Bricker, and Aurora Roghair.

Tennessee and Florida are in a tight race for the fourth-place trophy. The Volunteers just got Mona McSharry back after the Olympic medalist took the first semester off, and McSharry should boost her team not only in her individual events but also the relays. Florida hasn’t made an addition like that, but they can deploy Bella Sims in a range of events. It will be hard for Sims to narrow down to three, but picking the right three could help the Gators push past Tennessee.

Mary-Ambre Moluh’s strong freshman campaign has launched Cal up to sixth, which would move them up five spots from their 11th-place finish in 2024. These rankings show that Arizona State could be another big riser; they’d earn 18th based on their mid-season results, which would be a big leap from 24th last season. A large part of that rise would be due to the progress their relays have made. On the flip side, USC’s results land them in 17th, well below the 8th place finish they achieved last season.

Men

The men’s NCAA Championships have the potential to be one of the most competitive meets we’ve seen in a long time. These simulated results don’t make it seem that way, as the Longhorns would win by 146 points over Indiana by this data. However, the lack of diving in this simulation hurts the Hoosiers. Last year, Indiana scored 121 points on the boards, which makes up a majority of the ground to Texas.

The Longhorns have been swimming fast all season and Cal, a perennial contender in the team trophy race, only focuses on the big show in March. The Golden Bears haven’t shown all their cards yet, which keeps them further down the rankings whenever we do an exercise like this one. This data accounts for the arrival of mid-season additions like Lucas Henveaux and Mewen Tomac, but a dual meet in January isn’t the best display of their capabilities. That goes for all the mid-season additions teams have made, like Caspar Corbeau, Chris Guiliano, Rafael Miroslaw, and Matt King.

Tennessee looks incredibly strong this season, highlighted by Jordan Crooks and Gui Caribe’s performances thus far. Last year, the Volunteers finished 6th, the team’s best finish since 2001. Could they rise higher than that this year? Their 800 freestyle relay has reached new heights, which was one of the barriers to them getting involved in the top 5 race last season.

In this tight of a team race, relays, like diving, are going to play a huge role. Tennessee’s rise in the relays could play spoiler for other teams. The Vols are peaking at the right time, while we’ve recently gotten confirmation that neither Macguire McDuff nor Adam Chaney will race for the Gators this season, which is a huge blow to Florida’s relays and aspirations in the overall standings. Meanwhile, Arizona State, the defending champions, will be hoping to use their relays to maintain their place in top five after losing a lot of individual points in the offseason.