Swimulator Conference Projections: Pac 12

With more than half the season and all the mid season rest meets complete, it’s time to start looking ahead to conference meets. Today: the Pac 12 (ACC, Big 10).

To project the meets, I’ve used SwimSwam’s Swimulator (available on the front page). This tool creates scores out a meet using top times so far this season (it can also do average times), while respecting plausible event combinations and trying to maximize each team’s points. It does not include diving. To get an idea of how we can expect these projected scores to change at the real meet, I compared last year’s projection as of today’s date to the real conference score at last year’s championship meet.

Pac 12 Men

The Pac 12 men’s meet looks to be close again with Cal as the favorite. Cal leads the way with 796 projected swim points. Stanford is 159 points back with 637. Last year Stanford out scored Cal by 117 points on the boards. Not all of Stanford’s diving points are back, but a lot of them are. That means that with diving the projected gap is closer to 60 points in favor of Cal. That is an easily closeable gap for Stanford, but it would require them to reverse the trend from last year Last year Cal beat their January projection by 27 points and Stanford was 43 points worse for a net gain of 70 for Cal. If Stanford can flip that around, they could defend their title. Otherwise Cal should complete the first half of the conference/nationals double.

The top individuals are unsurprisingly dominated by swimmers from the top 2 teams. The highest projected points scores are Grant Shoults of Stanford with 57, Andrew Seliskar of Cal with 53, Justin Lynch of Cal with 53, Mike Thomas of Cal with 48, Santo Condorelli of USC with 47, and Nick Thorne of Arizona with 47.

Pac 12 Women

Stanford leads the way with 1330 projected points over Cal’s 1278. Last year at this time the team’s projected scores were within 20 points and Stanford won the meet by almost 200 points. Stanford doesn’t have an 800 free relay in this year’s projection because they haven’t swum it yet this season(they didn’t enter it at their mid season meet). Cal has all 5 relays, so simply by entering that relay Stanford’s projected lead would be at least 50 point larger. Stanford won last year by moving up in lots of events while Cal mostly stayed put. Diving was pretty close (Stanford +22 vs Cal) and most of the divers are back for both teams this year. For Cal to with this meet they’ll need a point jump similar to the one Stanford had last year.

It’s worth noting here that Cal, Stanford, Arizona St, and UCLA were each missing a relay in the mid season 2017 projection. This can happen if a team hasn’t swum a relay yet to this point in the season or if a time is simply missing from USA Swimming’s database due to unreported meets or errors. This is why the net differences vs the projection are so heavily positive. Outside of the added relay, Cal lost points vs the projection last year. They aren’t missing the relay this year. Arizona St and Stanford still gained a lot of points, but it was closer to 100 for each team.

Projected individual scores are led by Katie Ledecky of Stanford with a perfect 96 followed by Kathleen Baker of Cal with 92, Katie Drabot of Stanford with 92, Abbey Weitzeil of Cal with 91, and Louise Hansson of USC with 87.

If you want to look at the event by event projections or more detailed swimmer points projections, follow the links to the full Swimulator projections.  Articles on other D1 conferences are forthcoming (here’s the ACC, Big 10, and some D3 conferences). In the meantime, if you want to know the projections for other conferences feel free to run your own custom projection here.