Who Adds and Who Drops at the Women’s NCAA Swimming & Diving Championships? (2024 Update)

2024 WOMEN’S NCAA SWIMMING AND DIVING CHAMPIONSHIPS

• March 20-23, 2024
• Gabrielsen Natatorium, Athens, Georgia
• Short Course Yards (25 yards)
• Meet Central
• Psych Sheets
• SwimSwam Preview Index
• Live Results
• Live Stream

Last week, we mathed-out the projected scoring in swimming events for the 2024 NCAA Women’s Swimming & Diving Championships, using pre-meet seeds to count how the meet would come out if 1) divers didn’t happen, and 2) everyone went exactly their seed time.

Of course, that’s only a piece of the puzzle. Swimmers get better, swimmers get worse, DQs happen, and psych sheet scoring is a guide for expectations, but not a crystal ball.

So how do we fill in that other variable on the swimming side? One way is to be patient and wait for the meet to start. The other is to use past performance as an indicator of what we *might* see next week in Athens.

In that vein, we’ve calculated out how teams generally perform at NCAAs relative to their seeds.

Interestingly, teams seem to be, as a whole, getting better at swimming well at the NCAA Championships. Last year, we didn’t see any of the bombs that we’ve seen in past years. We also didn’t see as many teams fly up the charts as we have in the past (like Texas in 2022).

The Virginia women at +66.5 and the Indiana women at +47 were the two big risers. After them it was Indiana at +30 and Virginia Tech at +23. After that, everyone was pretty close to what they were projected.

The Virginia women’s number always has to be given the context that because swimmers like Alex Walsh swim different races at NCAAs than they do at ACCs, sometimes they get a little bump that isn’t really a performance indication.

Last year, for example, she was the 30th seed in the 200 fly, but she finished 2nd. So that’s +17 that isn’t really a +17. That doesn’t fully explain Virginia’s improvements, though, and that won’t be as much of a contextual issue this season with their best swimmers already holding top seeds.

It’s also important to keep in mind that many of these programs have new head coaches this season that could impact their training plans or taper cycles. On this list, that includes Northwestern, Duke, UCLA (sort of), Michigan, Cal (sort of), and Kentucky. Unsurprisingly, that includes some of the worst-performing teams at NCAAs in recent years.

Then there’s also Tennessee, where a simple average maybe doesn’t tell their full story. They had a really bad NCAA Championship meet in 2022, where coaches went all-in on the SEC Championship. They also had a really bad championship in 2019.

But in 2021 and 2023, they were solid, beating seed. That -161.5 in 2022 is going to be an anchor for them for another year by this metric, but don’t expect them to lose 50 points versus seed this season.