Which Men’s Event Was The Most Difficult To Qualify In For NCAAs?

2025 Men’s NCAA Swimming and Diving Championships

• March 26-29, 2025
• Weyerhaeuser King County Aquatics Center, Federal Way, Washington
• Short Course Yards (25 yards)
• SwimSwam Pick’Em Contest
• SwimSwam Preview Index
• Psych Sheet

The cutline for NCAA qualification is determined in a way to ensure that all events end up with (almost) the same number of direct qualifiers. A result of this is that not all qualifications are equal – some events are deeper than others, and the fight for those final few spots fiercer. Which then is the most difficult event to qualify in?

Depth

There is an easy way to look at the depth in each event – the NCAA ‘A’ and ‘B’ cuts. The ‘A’ cut is calculated as the average of the 8th place time in the NCAAs from each of the past three years, with the caveat that the ‘A’ cut cannot be slower than in a previous year. The ‘B’ cut is determined similarly, but using the 125th place time instead.

The men look to be pushing beyond those ‘A’ cuts. Six of the 13 events have more than 8 ‘A’ cuts, with breaststroke standing out as the strongest with 11 and 9. The 400 IM and 100 backstroke have by far the fewest with four apiece, however there are reasons for each of these.

Swimmers in general are at their best in distance events such as the 400 IM only once a season, and at this time last year there were only five swimmers under this year’s ‘A’ cut time before further four did so at NCAAs. Meanwhile the 100 backstroke lost three of its top four from last season (Kacper Stokowski, Brendan Burns and Adam Chaney), with a further two ‘A’ finalists still yet to break 45 seconds so far in 2024/25 (Destin Lasco and Ruard Van Renen)

The ‘B’ cuts have quite a range, but every event has more than expected. The sprint freestyles have nearly 190 swimmers under the ‘B’ cut each, although in freestyle as the distance increases the number of ‘B’ and ‘A’ cuts combined decreases drastically.

So, do more ‘B’ cuts mean more ‘A’ cuts, or vice versa? And do either of them track well to how difficult the qualification for NCAAs is in each event?

Graphs, Graphs, Graphs

We’ve distilled the key information from the ‘A’ cut, ‘B’ cut and qualification cutline this year into a series of graphs

IM looks to have the least depth at the top, whereas breaststroke is the opposite with both distances having more than eight ‘A’ cuts. There is a consistent spread between 7 and 11 though, with no one event standing out.

The ‘B’ cuts don’t match up too badly with the number of ‘A’ cuts. In the stroke events there are a similar number of ‘B’ cuts at each distance, however you can see the drop off in freestyle as the distance increases.

There’s a slight but noticeable upwards trend here between ‘A’ cuts and ‘B’ cuts, in contrast to the trend on the women’s side. The sprint freestyles are out on their own in terms of ‘B’ cuts, but the majority of events fall between 7-11 ‘A’ cuts and 145-165 ‘B’ cuts without any particular pattern between the two.

There is no great trend between number of ‘B’ cuts and the difficulty of the ‘B’ cut either. In fact, this leads to not dissimilar takeaways to the previous graph: sprint freestyles incredibly deep, markedly fewer ‘B’ cuts in the mile and everything else in the middle.

Qualification

Now that we’ve had a look at the depth in each event, we can take a look at the key question – How difficult was it to qualify for each event at NCAAs? We’ll make use of two ratios here:

1. The ‘B’ cut/‘A’ cut ratio
2. The final qualified swimmer’s time/‘A’ cut ratio

It’s important to note that the final swimmer is not always at the same season-wide ranking. Event choices take swimmers such as Luca Urlando and Hubert Kos out of events they are ranked highly for.

The trend line here represents the relationship between the two ratios. We’d expect the trend of these two variables to agree reasonably well, even though swimmers’ times are not completely evenly distributed.  Events above the line were slower than average this year, events below were faster.

We can quantify the relationship from this graph with the ratio of the two ratios, which we’ll call Difficulty Factor. This will tell us definitively which events were the most difficult to make the cut in compared to their ‘B’ cuts.

The 100 breaststroke is top here, and by our metric the most difficult event to qualify in this year. It’s one that has seen huge growth recently: this year’s cutline would have placed you 6th in both prelims and finals at the 2021 championships.

What we can look at with these times is the number of swimmers that would have qualified in each event if they were the cutlines instead. Mathematically this would be each point moving either up or down until it meets the line. Here’s a look at how two times compare, and how the number of swimmers in each event would differ if this were the case.

We have not included any swimmers who would have already been under the cutline but chose not to enter the event

The 200 IM would lose 7 swimmers, whilst the 100 breaststroke and mile would gain the same number. Of the eight events under the trend line in the previous graph, only four gain swimmers – the other four remain the same (the cutline fell on line 28 for the 400 IM and 100 backstroke).

For a final graph, we’ve normalised the percentage of ‘B’ cuts by the percentage difference between the ‘A’ and ‘B’ cuts, and then compared to the percentage of swims under the ‘B’ cut that were ‘A’ cuts this year – a mark of how much of the depth resides at the top.

Two of the top four here are breaststroke events, and there’s an interesting stat from the 100 this year. There has never been more than one swimmer under 50 seconds in a single NCAA season before: there are two already this year (Julian Smith and Finn Brooks) with a third (Nate Germonprez) less than two-tenths away.