Which Men’s Teams Move Up and Which Move Down at the NCAA Championships? (2022)

2022 MEN’S NCAA SWIMMING & DIVING CHAMPIONSHIPS

• Wednesday, March 23 – Saturday, March 26, 2022
• McAuley Aquatic Center, Atlanta, Georgia
• Official Psych Sheets
• Live Results

In anticipation of the 2021 Men’s NCAA Swimming & Diving Championships, we’ve scored out the psych sheets. But exactly how much does that tell us?

In an effort to see how teams typically perform relative to their seeded points, we’ve gone back over the past several years to come up with team-by-team averages of points gained or lost from seed.

Our chart below averages the 2019, 2018 and 2017 seasons, with each team’s gain/loss from seeded points listed. The 2020 meet is missing, as the actual NCAA meet itself was canceled amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Observations:

• Cal, generally, improves the most from seed at the NCAA Championships of any team in the country. This year, they enter the meet with the most seeded swimming points of any team in the country, and have a few spots where it seems clear they’re going to improve (12th seed in the 200 medley relay, for example). Texas has plenty of room to move up as well, but this year, they’ll have to dig out of that hole with only one diver who earned an invite via the primary channel: Andrew Harness, who scored 7 diving points at NCAAs last year. That puts the two teams, by seed and including diving, at about dead-even (Cal has a 7.5 point swimming advantage on paper this year). The last time where Texas improved its swimming points by more than Cal at NCAAs was 2017 (190 vs. 38). Texas will probably bring another diver via the institutionally-funded route, Noah Duperre, who scored 23 points at last year’s NCAAs, though he’ll need to be better at NCAAs than at Zones to markedly shift Texas’ outcome.
• The Stanford men have been really good at beating seed in recent history, though that hasn’t netted them the high finishes that they’re used to. They come into the meet seeded with the 6th-most points. That puts them within some reasonable striking distance of Arizona State and NC State, though those teams also often improve from seed.
• The Louisville women are better than any team in the country at improving from their conference meet to NCAAs. The men have a remarkably different pattern, though, sometimes improving and sometimes not. Last year, in spite of having a wildly-successful meet that included the school’s first-ever relay title, they still lost 41.5 points from seed.
• The Tennessee women lost 161.5 points from seed last weekend in Atlanta, which is one of the biggest numbers we’ve ever seen. The men historically haven’t been much better – losing an average of 38.17 points each season versus seed. Remember that the Tennessee men are rarely seeded to score as much as their women, so on scale, that’s about as bad, even if the rote numbers aren’t as big.
• The Michigan women didn’t have a great NCAA meet either, and with the men’s team historically adding more than any other program at NCAAs, they could slide from their projected 13th place finish.

A few notes on these numbers:

• The numbers are swimming points only – we’ve factored out diving, where no good version of a psych sheet exists.
• Points gained from seed are listed in green, while points lost from seed are listed in red.
• Obviously, there are plenty of outside factors that play into each of these numbers, and they aren’t a hard and fast predictor of future seasons’ outcomes. But we can at least identify multi-year trends as we try to diagnose why those trends exist.
• The biggest caveat here is that we’re calculating by total points – in order to lose significant points from seed, you also have to have a lot of seeded points. Same goes for the teams at the top, because you can’t move up 50+ points from seed without qualifying lots of individuals and some relays. So you’ll mostly see big-name teams at both extremes, if only because those are the teams with bigger NCAA groups and more ability to move up or down at the meet itself.
• Where zeroes are listed, a team had athletes at the NCAA meet and finished right on their psych sheet projection, even if that projection was zero. A blank space typically means a team had no swimmers or relays at NCAAs that year, and we didn’t factor that into their average as a zero.
• We’ve included the 2017 numbers just because we already have them, but the average is based on the most recent three NCAA Championship meets.

For those on mobile or who can’t see the embedded sheet above: