Statistical Analysis: Ranking the women’s conference championships

Earlier today, USA Swimming Stats released a chart on Twitter tracking the relative top-end depth of each of the major women’s conference championships that took place over the weekend. The chart, copied below, shows the 1st place and 8th place time in each event at the conference championships, giving a brief glimpse into what it took both to win, and to A-final in, the 5 conference championships listed:

(Data courtesy of USA Swimming Stats)

You can see the original tweet here, but it should be noted that the 1st place times are taken from finals, while the 8th place times reflect prelims, to account for any finals or prelims swims that were coasted or sandbagged.

Those numbers give a great insight into the conference meet action, but we at SwimSwam wanted to look even deeper. We’re all swimmers, with the classic compulsive swimmer’s need to rank everything, so why not apply that idiosyncrasy here?

Ranking the Conferences on Top-End Depth

The following two charts rank each of the times provided by USA Swimming with respect to the other conferences. The fastest winning time is ranked 1, the slowest 5. Same with the 8th place times in the second chart. The bottom row of each chart shows the average ranking for each conference over the entire swimming schedule of the conference championships.

Some of the numbers likely won’t surprise you much. The ultra-fast women’s Southeastern Conference (SEC) is easily the top-ranked conference in 1st and 8th place times. The Big Ten and Atlantic Coast Conferences (ACC) are predictably close, with the newly-formed American Athletic Conference (AAC) and Ivy League trailing.

Other numbers are a bit more interesting, though: This year’s Big Ten appeared a little faster than the ACC in terms of winners, while the ACC was a tick faster in 8th place qualifiers. The Ivy League, while significantly behind the AAC in winning times, was solidly ahead in 8th place finishes, probably a product of an AAC featuring just 6 teams and a relatively unbalanced team competition with Louisville far out front.

Of course, there are plenty more ways to analyze last weekend’s results. A look at “true” depth would probably look all the way back to 16th or event 24th, considering both the ACC and SEC scored down to the C final. On the other hand, top-end times could be somewhat thrown off by how rested the top-tier athletes in each conference were (always a hot topic of discussion among swim fans).

This coming weekend will wrap up major women’s Division-I conference championships, and will help fit the remaining conferences into the puzzle. The Big 12 looks kind of like the AAC on steroids: one dominant program (Texas) and a small conference numbers-wise. Expect it to be fast up top but lacking some in depth. The big question for the moment, of course, is where the women’s Pac-12 will fit into things. You can bet it’ll be somewhere around the SEC tier, and we’ve no doubt our commenters will have no shortage of opinions on which conference will come up stronger. Check out the graphs below and fire away, SwimSwammers!

 1st Place Ranking Averages

8th Place Ranking Averages