How Much Faster Are Conference Championship Meets Getting? Part I: SEC Men

This article, the first of 10 ahead of the conference championships, will be looking at how the times at the conference level have been changing in the last five years (2020-2024) for the Power Five conferences and the Ivy League. It’s felt like times required to qualify, final, and win have been coming down considerably recently, but how much does the data back this up?

We’ll be including the Pac-12, despite its swimming & diving championships no longer running.

1. SEC Men’s
2. SEC Women’s
3. ACC Men’s
4. ACC Women’s
5. PAC-12 Men’s
6. PAC-12 Women’s
7. B1G Ten Men’s
8. B1G Ten Women’s
9. Big-12
10. Ivy League

The SEC, even before the addition of a loaded Texas team this year, has historically been an incredibly strong conference. Florida has dominated the men’s side in recent years (12 SEC titles in a row) but Auburn, Tennessee, Texas A&M and Georgia have all finished in the top 10 at NCAAs recently. The conference could be responsible for half of the top six this year, with Florida and Texas in the title hunt and Tennessee a powerhouse in the sprint freestyle events.

WHAT DATA ARE WE LOOKING AT? 

We’ll look at the times required individually to make ‘A’ (8th), ‘B’ (16th) and ‘C’ (24th) finals (where they exist), as well as the winning time for each year. For relays, we’ll choose to look at 1st, 3rd and 8th. If there were fewer than eight teams competing, we would just take the times from 1st and 3rd. Other than the winning individual time, these will all be from heats.

WHAT ARE WE INTERESTED IN?

Have the times got faster, and is there a definitive trend in the times? The first of these is simple to work out – were last year’s times faster than in 2020 – but the second is a little trickier. How do we judge what is significant and what is maybe due to a single swimmer, à la Leon Marchand? To make this decision, we make use of something known as correlation- essentially how much of a link is there between two separate variables. In our case, the two variables are the year and the finishing time for each position.

A QUICK STATISTICS REFRESHER

The R-value is the measure of correlation and can take a value between -1 and 1. To get a sense of what an R-value means, there are three important values:

• An R-value of 1 would indicate that there is a perfectly linear positive relationship between the two (eg. each year the winning time increases by 0.5),
• An R-value of -1 would indicate a perfectly linear negative relationship (eg. each year the winning time decreases by 0.5).
• An R-value of 0 indicates that there is no relationship between the two – the winning time does not depend on the year at all.

Think about plotting the data on a graph of year against time and drawing a best fit line through the points. The closer the points are to that line, the more correlated the data and the higher the R-value.

WHAT MAKES AN R-VALUE SIGNIFICANT?

With the data we’re choosing to look at, an R-value is only significant if it is either greater than 0.805 or less than -0.805. That is a pretty high threshold, and we’ll see that for some events and placings, there’s a strong trend that doesn’t quite hit this.

So what does significant mean? In this context, it means that we can say that there is an extremely strong trend in the times for this event and placement getting faster – and that it’s happening every year. A winning time that has a general downward trend but fluctuates pretty wildly year on year will have an R-value closer to zero than an event that gets faster at a slower rate, but gets faster every time.

The R-value in this case is a measure of consistency – how confident we are that this is a real trend and not just noise in the data. The significance level (0.805) is our confidence threshold in this. Because the significance threshold is so high, we’ll also define another – a Strong threshold. We’ll set this to be when the R-value is greater than 0.5 or less than -0.5. Anything between these two values we’ll call Weak.

AN OVERVIEW

Of the 67 event/position combinations, 60 have been trending faster over the last five years.

Of the seven where the time is trending slower or has no trend at all, six are for the winning time in individual events. The time required to make the ‘A’, B’, or ‘C’ final trended quicker in every case other than the 200 breast ‘C’ final.

The trend with the winning times does make sense – they depend much more on individual swimmers. We see it at the international level too: after Michael Phelps and Ryan Lochte retired, the times required to win the 200/400 IMs shifted considerably slower until Leon Marchand brought them back down. That’s why we see some statistically significant increases in winning time, for example in the 500 and 1650 freestyles.

FREESTYLE

Freestyle is an incredibly strong area for the SEC men – you have to go back to 2019 to find a year in which they didn’t win at least two of the freestyle events at NCAAs. Florida has long been known as Freestyle University, and it was only back in 2021 that they had a male swimmer finish top six in every freestyle event at the Olympics (Caeleb Dressel, Kieran Smith and Bobby Finke). Sprint specialist programs such as Tennessee also play a big part in the time drops here.

Three-quarters of the sprint free events were significantly faster last year than in 2020. The biggest percentage drop came in the 50 free – Jordan Crooks and Josh Liendo’s conference battle has taken the winning time down by over a second. It isn’t just the winning times that have seen significant drops either – in the 100 the 8th-place finisher in 2020 wouldn’t have made last year’s C-final.

The 500 and 1650 frees are both examples of a significant positive R-value. The winners in these events in 2020 and 2021, Kieran Smith and Bobby Finke, first broke the NCAA record and then swam almost identically the year after. The 1650 is the most obvious – the winning time last year was 26 seconds slower than Finke’s NCAA record-setting swim.

Whilst the winning times in the three years since aren’t slow – 4:09 and 14:38 would be top-10 times at NCAAs – a singular superstar can have an outsize effect on the trend for this data point. As we head down to the A/B/C final times, the law of averages comes in and balances the effect of these swimmers out.

BACKSTROKE

There is a trend in the two backstroke events – the winning time has fluctuated a fair bit but the times to make the A and B finals have improved considerably. Whilst the top end has had consistent stars in Shaine Casas, Zane Waddell and Adam Chaney, the competition for A-final places is the most exciting trend here. Every ‘A’ finalist in these two events in 2024 made the cut for NCAAs.

BREASTSTROKE

Breaststroke has been getting faster, but more slowly than the other strokes. The top of the 200, driven by internationals Aleksas Savickas (Florida) and Alex Sanchez (Texas A&M), has the strongest trend. Given Julian Smith’s breakthrough in the 100 this season though, the shorter distance might be about to catch up.

BUTTERFLY

The 200 fly has gotten deeper and the 100 fly has gotten faster. Crooks and Josh Liendo have driven the winning time for the 100 down under 44, a time that would have won NCAAs as recently as 2021. The 200 is another of those events where an SEC A-final nearly means certain NCAA qualification – the data suggests this should be the case in 2025. Luca Urlando is likely to drop the winning time for the 200 well under 1:40 this year, but when he hasn’t raced the event the time has actually stayed almost level.

IM

There is a definite split in the individual medleys – big changes in the 200, more gradual ones in the 400. This is most evident in the winning times. In the 400 the trend is pretty weak, but in the 200 this is shifting upwards. A big reason is that the winner in 2020 and 2021 was Shaine Casas, the 7th quickest performer of all time in both yards and LCM (and 2nd in SCM). Take these two years away and the trend is also pretty flat in the 200. Luca Urlando is the only active swimmer in the SEC with a PB in the event under 1:40, but he’s not swum it at conference level since 2022 and given his forays into backstroke may not do so this year either.

RELAYS

The SEC was home to one of the most iconic NCAA records for over a decade, Auburn’s 1:14.06 in the Men’s 200 FR, so it was fitting that the team that broke it in 2023 came from the same conference. It’s not only that relay record that has been broken in recent years, however, all five SEC relay records come from the time period we’re looking at here.

We see as close to perfect a relationship as we’re likely to in the winning time for the 400 free relay: -0.996. With that strong trend, the data suggests a winning time in the mid to low 2:44s this year. That may not be out of the question, with Texas, Florida and Tennessee all in the running for the conference title in the event – and Tennessee currently lead the NCAA with a 2:44.13 from their Invite in November.

All five relays show the winning time improving much quicker than the 8th place finisher, perhaps driven by those top teams better managing the double taper to NCAAs.

IN SUMMARY

Nearly half the data we looked at show a significant trend towards getting faster, and 78% show at least a strong trend. Looking more generally, of the 67 event/position combinations, 61 were faster in 2024 than in 2020 – that’s widespread improvement across strokes, distances and colleges. The teams in this year’s SEC were responsible for a third of the event wins at NCAAs last year – and with the reloading that Texas has done, they could win half this year. Not only is the SEC arguably the strongest men’s conference, but it also doesn’t look like relinquishing that position any time soon.