What Impact Would Scoring 24 Swimmers at NCAAs Have on Results?

We floated an idea to score NCAA championships to 24 places earlier this month. Several depth-based teams, such as Indiana’s women’s squad recently upset Michigan’s team that should fare far better . While the majority (60%) of SwimSwam readers opposed the idea, it did have some significant support.

Right now, college swimming has basically three formats which can favor different types of teams: dual meets, which the CSCAA ranks in their strength rankings; conference championships, some of which are scored to 24 places such as Big 10s; and NCAA nationals, which is scored to 16 places. The idea was that in scoring to 24 places, teams that were capable of winning power championships in the power five conferences would

To give an idea of what differences scoring NCAA championships to 24 place would make, we re-scored last year’s NCAA DI Men’s and Women’s championships. Shown below is the re-scored 2018 NCAAs along with the team’s previous scores and the previous places and the change in place for that team.

2018 Women

As it turns out, the top teams are basically the same. Where more of the differences lie are in the middle-tier teams. There is huge gap between placing top five at NCAAs and placing in the 25-5 range. A team can sneak into the top 10 at NCAAs with 4-5 really fast swimmers and a few relays that can make finals. But any team with a realistic shot at winning nationals will have at least 10-15 swimmers all scoring individually, which is really hard! So those teams benefit relatively little from having an additional eight swimmers score. Florida St. for example, the 42nd place team at Women’s NCAAs in 2018 moved up 19 spots scoring 24 deep since they had quite a few swimmers and divers right on the cusp of scoring. However, the overall change in terms of finishing position for most teams is relatively minor.

Changing the scoring would have made one big difference on the men’s side: it would have given Cal the title over Texas. This is just as easily described as Cal missing an opportunity in a 12-point meet that was historically close.

Also interesting was that scoring 24 vs. 16 places wouldn’t make a big difference in some of the conference championships that were referenced as motivation for the change. If you re-score 2019 Big Ten Women’s championships to 16 places, Indiana is still the victor over Michigan, this time 1220 to 1159.

Changing nationals to score to 24 places might have some benefits, but it doesn’t look like benefiting depth-heavy teams is one of them. Perhaps its best that NCAA swimming keeps its different formats – swimming tends to be a sport where the underdogs don’t often win – so a few different scoring formats give more teams a chance to shine.