Psych vs Seed: Which Men’s Teams Perform Better and Which Perform Worse at NCAAs (2025)

2025 Men’s NCAA Swimming and Diving Championships

• March 26-29, 2025
• Weyerhaeuser King County Aquatics Center, Federal Way, Washington
• Short Course Yards (25 yards)
• Psych Sheets

The Men’s NCAA Swimming & Diving Championships start in a few weeks, and just like we did for the women, we are trying to determine how the team race will play out.

We started this journey earlier this week when we scored out the psych sheets with no diving and predicting every team will swim their exact seed placement. While this method can be helpful in determining what the race might look like, it doesn’t paint a complete picture.

There are some things we can’t predict. Injuries and DQs happen to everyone and we don’t have a crystal ball telling us what swimmer would be injured when or what relay this team will DQ (though it would make our jobs easier). In the absence of these things, though, there are other methods to predict how a team might swim at Nationals.

Over the last few years, we have compiled the data for how a team performs at the meet vs how they were seeded to perform based on the scored psych sheets. While this is not a definitive method for determining placement, it can help give insight into what we might expect to see.

The men’s teams have far more volatility in their performances than the women, and where we are starting to see women’s teams carry their performances through, that has not been the case on the men’s side.

Last year, California had the biggest increase of any team, adding 125.5 points to their seeded score. This was expected on our end, since many of their top swimmers did not compete at PAC-12s last season and were seeded poorly as a result. Cal is a team that typically out performs their seed, and last year was just another example. In 2022, they improved 129 points, in 2021 they improved 119.5, and in 2019 they improved 158. Based on our projections, they would need almost 200 points to catch Texas without including any diving.

Indiana also saw huge improvement from their seeded swims, adding 61.5 points to their seeded placement. This was slightly less than the +82 they saw in 2023, but was far better than the -25 and -22 they swam in 2022 and 2021.

Texas, who historically outperforms their seed by a large margin did not see that same trend at last year’s meet. They still increased their points by 30.5, but this was a much smaller improvement than their +170.5 in 2023, their +74.5 in 2022, and their +83.5 in 2021. If they repeat this performance this year, they could give other teams the stamina to catch them, though Florida is their closest competition and has underperformed in recent years.

Where teams are seeing huge improvements in their seeds, other teams have to see significant decreases. There are a finite number of points, and the points it took for Cal to improve by 125 had to come from somewhere.

Florida had the worst performance of the teams last year, dropping 69 points from the psych sheets. This was actually in-line with their performance from 2023 where they lost 66.5 points. They have had years where they performed well, but they have never had a +60 year which is what they would need to catch Texas.

After Florida, Georgia had the next worst performance at -57. They are similar to Florida in the fact that not every year sees that level of drop, but they go back and forth between improving and doing worse.

There are other factors to consider this year that can impact how a school will perform. ASU and Texas both have new head coaches, meaning they have new taper strategies. ASU historically adds just a bit from their seeded scoring, last year coming in at -14.5.

The other thing to consider is how conference realignments will affect these scores. While previously Texas has not needed to fully rest to win the Big-12s, they were in the SEC this year which meant two things, an earlier and longer meet, and a harder meet. ASU and Cal also moved conferences, which led to similar differences. PAC 12s ran a separate men’s and women’s meet with the men’s meet swimming one week later than the women’s but two weeks after than ACCs where Cal is now. This extra two weeks can significantly impact a rest/taper schedule that has previously worked well for the Bears.

The shift of these teams, along with others, also made these conference meets faster. How the other teams accounted for this extra speed could also play into NCAA performance.

ASU moved to the Big-12 which is just one week earlier, but they moved into an easier conference than the PAC-12. This could impact their Championship performance in a different direction if they needed less rest to win the meet.

The bottom line is, we can do all the predicting and analyzing in the world, but swimmers and coaches are human and we can’t account for that. Our charts have the average increase/decrease in performance over the last three years and the yearly increase/decrease, but that doesn’t tell the full story. We could be looking at a very exciting team race, though, with all of these factors being taken into account and the addition of diving, or… we could be looking at a Texas blowout.