2025 Women’s NCAA Swimming and Diving Championships
- March 19-22, 2025
- Weyerhaeuser King County Aquatics Center — Federal Way, Washington
- Short Course Yards (25 yards)
- Meet Central
- Official Psych Sheets
- SwimSwam Preview Index
- Live Stream
As we gear up for the women’s NCAA Championships next week, we have been doing our best to try and figure out how the team race might play out. Last week, we scored out the psych sheets to determine the final meet score with no diving and everyone swimming their seeds.
While this is a nice metric to see where teams have been already this season, it doesn’t tell the whole story. Some teams historically rest very well for NCAAs, but maybe their in-season performances don’t point to that. You can also see the trend on the opposite side, with teams that go all in for conference meets and then suffer a month later.
In an attempt to fill that gap, we analyzed how teams typically perform at Nationals vs how they were seeded to perform. We did the same thing this year, to help give us a closer look at what might happen next week.
At last year’s Championships, we didn’t see a ton of bombs. There weren’t any teams that significantly outperformed their seeds. Virginia had the largest point jump, improving 40 points from the scored psych sheet to the actual. They typically perform better, but this was their smallest jump in the last three years.
Stanford and Duke were the next best performers, both increasing 36 points, with Stanford adding an extra half point to +36.5. This was an improvement for the Cardinal who dropped 11 points in 2023. Duke is generally in the green, but 36 was still a significant improvement from the +4 the year before.
The same was true on the other side. California had the worst performance, dropping 48 points from their seeded place. While this might seem like a lot, last year was the first time since at least 2018 that we haven’t seen a team drop 50+ points.
The Tennessee women have a sort of reputation for underperforming, and while last year’s performance was nothing close to the -161.5 one they had in 2022, they were a little behind where we originally placed them at -23 points. They are still being dragged down by that 2022 score, but they are likely not going to drop 50 plus points this year, despite what their average says.
Another storyline to watch is the ASU women. They are fresh off their first ever conference title at the Big-12s and this is their first season with Herbie Behm as head coach, which could affect their taper and performance in either direction. They have historically struggled to reperform, averaging a loss of 21 points from psych sheets to the actual meet, with last year’s performance coming in at -36.
On the spreadsheet we have the last three years averaged, but it is important to remember that sometimes schools have historically bad or historically good performances in particular seasons, so the first column doesn’t tell the whole story. Texas looks like strong performers, but this is primarily thanks to the +83 they had back in 2022. In the last two years they have been slightly off their seeds.
Weird how Texas and Florida both having a very strong showing in 2022 relative to seed is driving their overall scores while nearly all other years they underperformed.
It’s a helpful metric, and interesting to see.
I just wish I had infinite time. I would first need to improve my modeling skills. Then I would need the more of this extra time I suddenly have to build a model that looks at not only points vs the scored seeding points but factors in potential points since a team with 8 first place seeds and 2 tenth place seeds has a lot less potential to improve than a team with 2 first place seeds and 8 tenth place seeds. I suspect that might impact the analysis too.
Then I’d want to get the number of SB or PB swum at the meet for each team as another improvement factor… Read more »
One issue is that it appears that some teams took big hits in random years due to an injury to a big contributor, effecting individual and relays. Large outliers for a couple that I eyeballed were explained by a known injury or absence.
Wisconsin outperforming consistently. No surprise that VA is outperforming; when you have that much talent, you don’t have to fully taper for your conference meet.
A lot of that is Phoebe, she is consistently at her best at the biggest meets, she was much better in season/at big tens this season compared to last. Interested if she still drops a lot or maybe she is training a bit differently.
This article is fun in anticipation of the meet, but some of the numbers are pretty misleading. I appreciate the disclaimers in the article saying so. Ought to run the data like a diving score; throw out the high and the low year and average what’s left. Then compare both charts to this year’s results and see which was more accurate.
My bad, I see just the last three years are averaged. NVM
I forgot how well Texas did in 2022. You know, we always make fun of Texas and Capitani for the “Texas taper,” but maybe we should shift that to the other UT(K).
Just went on swimcloud – they had a grand total of 4 PBs and 3 SBs across all of their swims. Might be one of the worst performances at NCAAs relative to ability ever
Everybody can have a bad year once in awhile – now is now and you will see a different UTK and probably a typical UTA performance.
UTK prioritized SEC’s HEAVILY that year – they were absolutely phenomenal at that meet, wiped the floor with the other teams. It doesn’t look like they treated it as seriously this year so I expect a decent performance from them.
It was almost shockingly bad, so many of them were getting last in their heats by whole body lengths repeatedly.