This time of the season, we’re seeing some teams have breakthroughs, some figure things out, some tread water, and some get bogged own in struggles we hoped they’d get over by now. Here’s who I’m watching, anticipating and worrying about as we get into the real meat of the college gymnastics season.
Question: What is happening in the SEC?
The head-to-heads in the nation’s most competitive conference are fairly bananas, and the standings, particularly where making the night session of the conference meet is concerned, aren’t much easier to understand. A great deal of the normal early season sense that the rankings don’t make sense comes down to the SEC right now.
Some of this is predictable: Of course Florida is phoning it in in January, and of course LSU has turned out to be pretty high-variance. You can make the case that Kentucky getting this hot and Arkansas evolving into a real contender are things that were bound to happen eventually, but both at the same time, in January? It’s a big ask, and yet here we are.
Let’s take a look at the conference regular season standings.
It’s way too soon to analyze this—and I’m not the person to do it in any case—but I just want to point out that it’s ridiculous. The Missouri and Alabama upsets this weekend could turn out to be super consequential, as could Alabama tying Arkansas. Kentucky losing to LSU in the PMAC didn’t feel like a big deal at the time, but could it be eventually? Maybe. Not sure.
Bonus Questions:
Is Ashley Miles Greig magic? Iowa State’s turnaround this season is truly, truly remarkable, and it extends beyond results into the overall vibe of the team. I don’t know what exactly is going so well in Ames right now, but it’s something very special.
How good is Alabama? I haven’t decided yet, and I kind of get the feeling that Alabama hasn’t decided either. Obviously, it’s good enough to be at least in the mix for the SEC night session and a nationals spot. But beyond that? Final Four? Credible and/or regular 198.000-plus scores? Maybe. The pieces are there, but I’m still waiting to see if it will all coalesce.
Comment: It’s all to play for for Ohio State.
Ohio State is leading the Big Ten. Despite losing to a slightly haphazard-looking Michigan team, the Buckeyes are still ahead in the national standings, and a rising Michigan State is also still slightly behind Ohio State. The consistency and steadiness that Ohio State has shown across meets this year is remarkable, starting from the first week when this team posed a real challenge to LSU in the PMAC.
Still, there are questions Ohio State needs to answer to retain its position. It’s coming off three consecutive home meets, which is favorable to most, and compared to Michigan and Michigan State it lacks a bit of upside. All four Ohio State meets thus far fall within a range of 0.325. To keep pace, it will be necessary to push toward 197.500 soon, if not higher.
That said, watching the Buckeyes, I don’t feel that it ought to be particularly challenging to progress to higher totals. This is a team that takes very few built-in deductions, and incidental deductions like scrappy landings tend to improve through the season for most teams. Given that most of the deductions Ohio State is taking right now are of the incidental variety, I think it’s doable to keep pace with its more experienced conference rivals. I watch these meets that end with scores around 197 and think that there’s enough overtly left on the table that 198s should be possible.
Saying and doing are very different things at such a high level, though. With some road meets ahead, now would be a great time for Ohio State to refine a little more and reach the upper echelon of team scores before its rivals, particularly Michigan, really force the issue. Ohio State is good enough to win the conference title in theory. Whether it’s good enough to do it in practice remains to be seen.
Bonus Comments:
This week’s ACC Freshman of the Week was committed to a different ACC school until literally six months ago. Ashley Knight has immediately become a staple of N.C. State’s leg-event lineups. Hard not to imagine that there’s a bit of regret over in Chapel Hill over letting her get away.
I just don’t care that Florida kind of sucks right now, and you shouldn’t either. The Gators are a March team living in a January world. Maybe they’ll figure it out later in the season or maybe they won’t, but either way, what happens now has absolutely no bearing on their postseason prospects. A full-strength Florida doesn’t need a good seed or a good draw to cruise to nationals, and a weak one won’t be saved by the draw either. Panicking over Florida in January is an annual tradition (and let’s be honest, a lot of it is poor faith panicking by people who really enjoy these results), but we should have learned by now that it’s a fool’s errand. None of this matters.
Concern: I’m beginning to think it’s not going to happen for North Carolina
When Danna Durante took over at North Carolina, I was really optimistic. I thought her big-team experience would be a great complement to Marie Case Denick’s well-established strengths in recruiting and floor coaching and that they’d quickly be able to leverage huge prospects like five-star recruits Lali Dekanoidze and Gwen Fink to quickly rehabilitate a weak bars rotation, ceasing to have to struggle to make regionals and beginning to push toward regular 197.000-plus scores.
Suffice to say, that hasn’t happened. After a promising first season, the Tar Heels’ supposed breakthrough seems to have stalled out. This year seemed like a struggle even before Dekanoidze’s injury, and the current ranking of No. 48 is comparable to the worst bars nightmare years of the previous era. Floor, the signature event of pre-Durante UNC that provided a positive to even the worst meets, is currently ranked No. 57.
It’s hard to point to one thing that went wrong. Injury management has certainly been a weakness, and landings and stamina pose challenges across all four events, but there’s an intangible listlessness that I find harder to explain. Recruiting is still a strength (as it should be at a school that has so much to offer both academically and athletically), but it’s hard to get excited when so many great recruits of past years are currently injured or just not performing to their potential.
We’ve gotten into the habit of always thinking of UNC as on the cusp of a breakthrough, and it’s easy to default to that mental model even in the absence of evidence, but at this point, the evidence is really slim that everything is about to change. Nobody’s coming to save the Tar Heels. Either they figure out how to score 9.900 more often than they score 9.600 with the wealth of talent on the roster, or they don’t.
Bonus Concerns:
Some teams are going to have an NQS come Monday. Too soon. Stop that.
Iowa has scored lower in each successive meet this year. And I don’t know yet how serious that Kenlin injury is going to be, but it certainly doesn’t feel like good news.
READ THIS NEXT: Questions, Comments, Concerns: Week 3
Article by Rebecca Scally
