Tennessee and Cal Lead Women’s Midseason Projected NCAA Cut List

During a bit of a lull in the NCAA competition season between midseason invites and second semester dual meets, the SwimSwam statistics department has been hard at work crunching the numbers for a hypothetical NCAA Championships invite list. While plenty of fast swimming is still to come at the February and March conference championship and last chance meets assures that this list will change significantly, it’s fun nonetheless to see how the programs stack up after the invites. 

Following the release of the hypothetical cut lines, we will score out the “NCAA psych sheet” as it stands to project current NCAA finish. We already covered the men, and now we check on the women. 

In a bit of a surprise, there is a tie at the top of the projected qualifier list with the Tennessee Lady Vols and Cal Golden Bears both sitting at 17 projected qualifiers. The defending NCAA Champion Virginia Cavaliers sit alone in third with 13 projected qualifiers. 

The current projected cut line is for all 41st ranked swimmers to qualify, with no swimmers on the 42 line projected to qualify. Similar to the men, this number is much softer than historically is invited to the NCAA Championships. If history is a reliable guide the invite number should settle somewhere in the high-30s. 

List of Qualifying Teams (and # of qualifiers)

List of Qualifying Individuals

First five alternates

A few other interesting notes:

• Alabama, which is in Margo Geer’s first year as head coach, sits in a five-way tie for the 4th most qualifiers. They are joined by Michigan, NC State, Ohio State and Louisville. The Crimson Tide finished in 5th at last year’s NCAAs with 266 points, just 24 points behind 4th place Cal. 
• Texas, which finished 3rd at last year’s NCAA Championships and only 9.5 points out of second, sits in a tie with Northwestern for the 16th-most qualifiers with 7. Despite the relatively small squad, the Longhorns are right on track with last year’s 3rd place squad, which only qualified 8 individual swimmers to NCAAs. 
• Auburn, in head coach Ryan Wochomurka’s first year, currently has 6 swimmers projected to make the cut. Despite not scoring at NCAAs last year, Auburn had 8 individual swimmers at the meet.
• Stanford, which won three consecutive NCAA titles from 2017-2019, sits in a tie with conference rival USC with 9 projected qualifiers, 14th most in the country. Last year Stanford finished 9th with 159 points, the lowest finish of Greg Meehan’s tenure on The Farm. With the return of Canadian Olympian Taylor Ruck and a star-studded freshman class the Cardinal seem poised to shoot up the team standings this year, but will have some work to do in the spring to make up the qualifier gap. 
• Despite head coach Mike Litzinger abruptly resigning in October, Notre Dame sits in a tie for 20th with Minnesota and Arkansas with 5 projected individual NCAA qualifiers. That is essentially in line with last year’s team, which sent 6 individual swimmers to NCAA’s, resulting in a 29th place finish with 12 points.