We got our first conference championship result this weekend. Scary, right? Congratulations to N.C. State on locking down the inaugural regular season ACC championship. Here’s what I’m watching, anticipating, and worrying about as we prepare for NQS rankings… for real this time?
Question: Why did Arizona have to drop a season low at THAT meet?
As we’ve now mentioned several times in this column, Arizona has been having a wonderful season. In fact, the Wildcats finished this weekend in style with a 196.950 on the road and rank No. 17 in live NQS. That said, not all meets are created equal, and you can bet that the Wildcats would have loved to turn in their best against Arizona State on Thursday night. Unfortunately, it wasn’t to be.
Arizona’s cross-state rivalry is an intense one, to the point that past years’ iteration of the Territorial Cup has inspired some rare trash talk from gymnasts. (If there was any this year, I didn’t see it, but I will declare myself strongly in support of that sort of thing.) Since Arizona is having its best season in years and also hosted this edition, it seemed like a good opportunity to beat the Sun Devils in a dual for the first time since 2016 (!). Instead, the Wildcats floundered in the first half of the meet, turning in season lows on both vault and bars and left themselves too much to do in the second half. There’s nothing embarrassing about a 196.250, but dropping eight consecutive rivalry meets isn’t a great feeling. Hard to tell whether this was pure bad luck or if the Sun Devils are actually that much of a bugaboo.
Bonus Questions:
Who wants to be in the top four? The scenarios for next week’s opening NQS rankings (more on that in a second…) are wide open, and for the precious top four spots that make you a favorite to make the national final, seven teams are in the mix. Oklahoma, LSU, and California have all locked in a top four spot in the week eight rankings, but the final spot is to fight for between Kentucky, Utah, Michigan State, and Florida.
Has North Carolina really woken up, or was that a blip? A season high by more than 1.300 is a remarkable achievement for the Tar Heels. Bars and beam both crossed 49.000 for the first time, which must feel great. It might be a one-off, and the judges may have helped out. This score will also drop off the ranking next week with NQS unless the Heels have something even better in the tank. Some skepticism is necessary here because it’s such a drastic turnaround, but it’s also just a badly needed positive in a season that hasn’t had a lot of them.
Comment: Beware of Testing Depth Season™
Emma Malabuyo’s trip to Cairo this weekend was incredibly successful for her, but definitely played a part in UCLA’s loss to Utah. It won’t be her last absence this season as she fights for an Olympic spot. Amelie Morgan, in turn, will be in England by time of publication and will stay there for a month. I’m not sure how well Utah is going to handle losing her consistency in a season in which they’ve needed it even more than usual.
The internationals aren’t going to be the only ones taking time off in the coming weeks. Numerous gymnasts around the country have competed nearly every possible routine thus far, and while some can live like that with minimal repercussions, others are eventually going to need to sit down for a minute. Mya Lauzon threw both of my fantasy teams for a loop by taking a (well-deserved) break last week, and if big-name absences haven’t impacted yours yet, it’s coming. Some teams will take personnel changes in stride, and in some cases, backup routines will succeed beyond all expectations. But for most, resting stars will sting a little bit. It’s a necessary sacrifice to keep everyone fresh for the postseason. Just try not to panic too much when you see someone missing on a lineup graphic.
Bonus Comments:
Yeah, N.C. State might not be quite THAT good, but it’s still very, very good and inexplicably underrated. It’s the best in the ACC in both scores and visual quality and yet seems to get the least attention. If you tune in this week just to try to figure out how that team scored that, everyone wins. Your eyes deserve the Emily Shepard experience.
What a way to bid farewell to the greatest rivalry in Pac-12 gymnastics. Utah at UCLA was not a good meet. It wasn’t quality, it wasn’t exciting, it didn’t have that rivalry meet buzz in any way. While that is a reasonable summary of the place that these two teams are in right now—with a lot still to figure out as the weeks speed past—at least it wasn’t a reminder of what we’ll be missing next year.
Concern: Let’s have some clarity on the base fundamentals of how the sport works, please?
This series of tweets resulted in a great deal of confusion this week. Tweet No. 1 resulted in the near-universal and very understandable misconception that NQS rankings would begin this Monday. This made some sense: 74 teams had a calculable NQS on Sunday night, which is a comparable number to when we’ve seen NQS rankings open in previous years. Apparently not this time.
The bigger picture is that it’s bizarre that we’re getting such important information from a tweet. Shouldn’t this be written down somewhere? Shouldn’t it be the same week every year so we can predict it—or something like that? I don’t know. Seems useful for having a functional sport and such.
As a sub-comment to this comment, I absolutely adore that RTN also still calls it RQS by accident. It hasn’t been RQS for about five years at this point, but I also still call it that sometimes. Sorry for being old.
I also apologize for the number of NQS references in this column. I had fully converted my mental model this week and obviously wasn’t successful at reverting it on short notice. The CGN NQS calculator spreadsheet shows up in my dreams sometimes.
Bonus Concerns:
We’re clearly still bearing scars from Tennessee. When a gymnast from a small team scores a 10.0 at a neutral site invitational with no stream, our life flashes before our eyes at this point. We probably owe Gigi Mastellone an apology: Her bars routine was actually good. I’m not Rhiannon, but to my eye, while that wasn’t the 10-iest 10 of all time, it was hardly an atrocity.
I won’t apologize to the All American Classic for the fact that everyone was willing to assume that scoring crimes of the highest degree would occur at their meet, though. If you don’t stream, you get what you get.
I watched a gymnast have to balk on a competition vault this weekend because an opponent stepped onto the runway in front of her. It was by all appearances a total accident, nobody got hurt, and the repeat vault was very successful. But still. Try not to do that, OK? I didn’t like it, and I imagine the vaulter liked it even less. No hard feelings, just constructive feedback.
READ THIS NEXT: Questions, Comments, Concerns: Week 6
Article by Rebecca Scally
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