While we all obsess over the official rankings, we all know they don’t always tell the whole story. When you factor in some DIII lowballing, conservative Big Ten judges and the occasional (frequent?) Carol-ing in the SEC, a teams’ ranking doesn’t always accurately reflect how they’ll match up against another squad. So, we present to you our Power Rankings, our de facto way of ranking who’s hot and who’s not and what you can expect from our top 20 teams.
We don’t know a whole lot heading into the season, but we have some hints based off of what we’ve seen from various intrasquad videos over the past month. Overall, most of the usual suspects are around their traditional preseason spots, but watch for teams like Minnesota and BYU to capitalize on boatloads of returners—and the experience that comes with that—to make some big moves this season. We’ll know a lot more after the opening weekend, where Oklahoma, UCLA, and a handful of other power teams will duke it out at the Collegiate Challenge. Is it January yet?
Also be sure to check out our previous Way Too Early Top 20 for a look at the last set of rankings to see how each team’s outlook has changed since May.
READ THIS NEXT: Introducing Technique Point
Want to receive the latest collegiate gymnastics news in your inbox? Sign up for the College Gym NewsLetter here.
Article by Brandis Heffner and layout by Claire Billman
Like what you see? Consider donating to support our efforts throughout the year! [wpedon id=”13158″]
Anyone who ranks UCLA as number 1 is either blind or VERY biased
Why? They only lost Katelyn and Brielle from last year. 3 routines. Healthy and consistently competing Maddie boosts the lineup by essentially the same amount. If both Glenns, Madison, Macy, and Sekai all stay healthy they have the potential to be much better than last year. ANd that’s not factoring in the freshmen or Sakti.
Next year though they lose 7 girls and somewhere between 13-16 routines. It will be ROUGH