And so we begin our annual trek to score out psych sheets and try to come up with any kind of reasonable expectations for how the NCAA Championship meet might work out.
This year, the big conclusion is that while Drury are the favorites to win the NCAA Division II title for a record 11th-straight year, it won’t likely be by the 208-point blowout by which they won last season.
By psych sheet scoring, Drury, Queens, and Lindenwood are all sitting within 30 points of each other, which is a very insignificant margin in this context.
Scoring out D2’s is a little bit of a tougher challenge than in Division I or Division III because of the specific Division II rules. Swimmers are limited to the same 7 total events, but they have a little more flexibility in that they can swim up to four individual swims, as compared to just three allowed in the other divisions of the NCAA. This means that many swimmers wind up being over-entered on psych sheets for the meet, including a swimmer like Matthew Josa, who is actually entered in five individual events.
We’ve gone ahead and scratched him out of two, presuming that he will swim the same three individuals and four relays that he did at NCAA’s last year, but with the rest of the field, there’s still a lot of questions to be answered. about the who, what, and when of entries. Most of the top swimmers joined Josa in three individual and four relay events, but that varied.
At any rate, below is our “best effort” at scoring out the psych sheets. Consider a rough guide to how the meet might play out in two weeks in Indy. The racing begins on March 11th and runs through March 14th at the IUPUI Natatorium.
| Teams | Score |
| Drury | 416 |
| Queens | 406 |
| Lindenwood | 389 |
| Nova S’eastern | 268 |
| Fl Southern | 216 |
| Grand Valley | 193 |
| Tampa | 184 |
| Saint Leo | 160 |
| Wayne State | 160 |
| Bridgeport | 143 |
| Delta State | 135 |
| Cal Baptist | 134 |
| West Chester | 128 |
| Wingate | 127 |
| Missouri S&T | 117 |
| Lewis | 106 |
| UCSD | 93 |
| Carson-Newnan | 67 |
| Limestone | 48 |
| Mines | 37 |
| Catawba | 33 |
| St Cloud St | 28 |
| Simon Fraser | 26 |
| Pfieffer | 25 |
| Truman | 20 |
| Indy | 16 |
| Jewell | 13 |
| IUP | 9 |
| Colorado Mesa | 4 |
| Findlay | 4 |
Can’t wait for this meet. However, I don’t know how you can’t consider the relays. To quote a local Icon here in Charlotte, Ric Flair, “to be the man, you’ve gotta beat the man.” Hope everyone brings their A game. Should be a lot of great swimming!!!
Gonna be a good battle… I’ll be tracking.
There is a women’s meet out there too!
I apologize, ACC’s coverage took over this weekend I’ll have the d2 women’s meet up within the next couple hours
FWIW, I did a quick individual event score out for Drury, Lindenwood and Queens. I don’t bother with relays because a lot of the lineups will change (example – I could almost guarantee you Drury will use Rzadkowski/Olson/Feher/Caceres for their 200 and 400 free relays at night and not Buckingham/Ross/Matacin).
But anyway, I came up with
Drury 245
Queens 221 Josa 3 ind/241 Josa in 4 (he did 3 ind/4 relay last year)
Lindenwood 231
Queens obviously has the least margin for error on that score as they have 6/7 top seeds depending on Josa.
Lots of Drury’s guys are entered with slower times than they went last year, and they always seem to have more in the… Read more »