Which Conference is the Fastest? NCAA D1 Women Conference Rankings

With all the conference meets completed, it’s now time to examine which conferences have been the best so far. For women in division 1 the best conference is not totally clear. Depending on what you value, the answer is either the Pac 12 or the SEC. Either way it’s close. To rank conferences I used two different methodologies “Super Nationals” which slightly favored the SEC and “Ultimate Dual Meets” which slightly favored the Pac 12. Neither method includes diving.

Super Nationals

The first ranking method was an invite format where each conference got 16 entries in each event and the meet was scored thru 368th place (368=23 conferences*16 places). The exact procedure I followed was:

1) Grab the top 3 times by swimulator power points for the top 17 swimmers on each team in a conference.

2) Find the top 16 times in a conference among those times

3) Pool the top 16 times from all conferences and rank them

4) Score out the ranking 368 points for 1st, 367 for 2nd…1 point for 368th

The SEC came out on top in this ranking over the Pac 12 by a score of 69,866 to 69,579.5. The difference was about 300 points, but on a score total of over 69,000 that’s not a big margin. The main reason for the difference was the Pac 12’s inferior depth. The back half of nearly every top 16 favored the SEC by wide margins. The ACC narrowly edged out the Big 10 for 3rd. The Mountain West beat out the Ivy League as the top mid major conference. The Big 12, home to national power Texas ranked only 9th due to their lack of depth behind Texas and small number of teams.

This isn’t a perfect ranking system. In this methodology, for top conferences, having “slow” swimmers at the back end of the top 16 is punished more harshly than having extremely fast swimmers is rewarded. For example, Katie Ledecky could drop 10 seconds off her mile and her value in this ranking wouldn’t change. She would still be ranked first and score the same number of points. In contrast, if a swimmer at the bottom of the rankings adds a second, they can drop many places which would cost their conference points. This is a flaw, but it does mirror how actual swimming competitions are scored, so I’m not sure how big of a flaw it is.

Here are the full conference rankings by this methodology:

Ultimate Dual Meets

The second ranking method was a head to head format where each conference got 16 entries in each event and was pitted against other conferences head to head in meets scored to 32nd place. The exact procedure I followed was:

2) Find the top 16 times in a conference among those times

3) Pool the top 16 times from every pair of conferences

5)Rank conferences by head to head W-L record

In this method the Pac 12 beat the SEC by as score of 3,246.5-3,199.5. The only closer meet was the CCSA vs the WAC which the CCSA won by 14 points. In a credit to the robustness of both methods, the ranking of only 2 other conferences changed. The America East and Northeast Conferences traded the 21st and 22nd rankings they held in the Super Nationals method.

The ACC beat the Big 10 3,320.5-3,127.5 to take 3rd place. The Mountain West beat the Ivy League 3,255.5-3,192.5 for 5th.

In this methodology, having slower swimmers at the end of a conference’s ranking is probably under punished. If for example, a conference has the last 5 swimmers in a match in the 100 freestyle, it doesn’t matter if their times are 52.0 of 1:00.0, it’s scored the same. Similarly for lower ranked conferences, extremely fast swimmers are arguably undervalued. An overall conference quality ranking should be able to account for time quality across every swimmer. The other method does to some extent. However, given the similarity of results between the two methods, perhaps these flaws are mostly hypothetical

Here’s the conference vs conference scores. It was too wide to fit in one table so half the columns are in this table and there’s a second table below with the second half of the data. The first score is the conference in the row, the second is the conference in the column.