Are relays worth too many points at conference championship meets?
They might be, at least until the relay disqualification technology becomes reliable enough to give confidence that it’s accurate.
Wednesday’s Ivy League Men’s Championships finals session was a bloodbath, with 4 relays being disqualified in two events. That includes both of Penn’s relays, costing them more than 90 points. Dartmouth disqualified two women’s relays at last week’s Ivy League Championship meet, and one again on Wednesday – where pictographic evidence seems to show a clearly-safe start.
There have been several other instances on social media this week where coaches have posted pictures of supposed early departures in relays, that the pictures seem to clearly show aren’t.
And I get it. The technology isn’t quite there yet, and not all conferences have the resources of the big conferences like the SEC to bring in the official Omega camera system to overturn relay disqualifications. Video and picture manipulation these days is so abundant that it’s hard to accept anything besides official cameras of record (plus, all teams need to be treated equally by any system allowed to overturn DQs, so you can’t just rely on one parent having camera footage of their kid’s team). Officials aren’t perfect, and they’re never going to be perfect. They should be well-trained, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to be perfect.
But until such a time when we can be perfect, we should mitigate the potential damage from a bad relay DQ call.
How Can We Do That?
Reduce the number of points that relays are worth at conference championship meets.
I know that on the surface that seems scary. But here’s the problem with relay scoring at conference championship meets: many conference championships these days score three finals, an A, a B, and a C. With top-24 scoring, that means every relay is scoring at a conference championship meet, with the top team scoring 64 points, and the bottom team scoring usually somewhere between 34 and 44 points, depending on the size of the conference.
That means that a team that would have finished 3rd could be disadvantaged by as many as 50 points for an incorrect call.
Ultimately, the raw point values of relays only matter when determining the punitiveness of a disqualification. So long as the the point differentials are the same, and every relay scores, it doesn’t matter if the first-place relay is worth 1,000 points or 30 points.
Relays, ultimately, don’t usually have a deciding impact on the outcome of conference championship meets. They do sometimes, like last week’s Patriot League Championships. But most of the time, they don’t. The occasion when relays most-consistently impact conference outcomes is when there are disqualifications.
There is a fair philosophy that relay DQs should be heavily-punitive. Swimming is a sport that generally relies on heavy-handed penalties for infractions. But should early-departures be so heavily penalized when we can’t seem to call them correctly at every level?
Yes, there are officiating mistakes in all sports. It happens. But few objective violations are as punitive as a swimming early departure is. A call that can be made with 100% accuracy, but so often seems to not be, should not have so much weight until it can be called correctly with more consistency.
In dual meets first place is 9-4-3-2-1 and relays are 11-4-2. Sure would be a different game if they were 18-8-6.
Actually does that somehow make getting 2nd and 3rd more equitable…
Reward the team, not the individual. You can’t have a team championship without relays. Points are appropriate where they are at now.
Willswim made the suggestion below to score B-relays, I propose a tweak to that. Score the top finishing (legal) relay for each school. So B-relays wouldn’t score unless the A-relay DQ’s. This allows teams to still gamble a bit with aggressive starts and try to squeeze out every hundredth while trying to qualify for NCAAs or edge over a conference rival, yet can still guarantee lower placing points (not decimating a teams placing at conference).
Ok so reduce relay scoring to what exactly? Relays are typically scored double the individual events….you haven’t really stated your solution. Would we score relay events the same as individual events? That doesn’t seem right considering the differences in type of event (more swimmers involved, relay starts, etc.). Relays should be worth more than an individual event plain and simple. The issue should be with the lack of accurate technology. There are an order of magnitude more correct DQs than incorrect DQs. Solve the officiating/tech problem, not restructure the scoring mechanism of the sport for a few bad calls.
It’s a bit weird to score 24 places in a championship meet in a relay event when there are only 12 teams. Seems like just changing the number of places scored for the relay events might be a decent compromise.
This a topic I literally flip flop on all the time. One moment I agree, Yes! Relays need to not be counted for as much. How many times have conference or NCAA meets been almost over in team scores because teams have hammered relay points the first two days, and the team races become basically inconsequential.
Then other times, I think, No! Relays are what keeps the smaller teams potentially somewhat competitive in a conference or NCAA’s if they have 4-5 solid swimmers who can drop good relays and ‘go up’.
On the officiating. It’s totally normal for all sports fans to bash the officials in their given sport. Let’s remember that for the most part, our sport… Read more »
Again, the scale of relay points don’t matter. Relays can be worth 1000 or 30, and as long as the spread between teams is the same, and everyone scores, it doesn’t matter.
Reducing points offered for relays only matters in one scenario: when there’s a DQ. If there are no DQs, making them worth 10000 points or 30 points doesn’t change the gap between the big teams and the small teams.
I guess you could argue that for the teams that only score relay points, it’s better for them to see 250 points on the board than 50? But again, it doesn’t make them any closer or further from the top teams.
Use reaction time + the ref’s BAC. That probably would have saved some Ivy teams.
we gotta train these refs better… theres so many instances where they give the dual confirm and its not even close. this occurs on all levels of the sport, not just the ncaa. the
benefit of the doubt is supposed to go to the swimmer meaning that if the call is debatable (which in these situations it clearly is), then the refs should drop it, not dual confirm.
Yup. DQs should be indisputable. Host teams need to be responsible for running a cleaner meet whether that is more cameras for review or better timing systems. If you can’t run a clean meet, don’t host.