While we anxiously await the 2025 college gym season, we decided to look back at one of the highlights of 2024: The NCAA National Championships. This meet was everything you could want from a national championship: thrilling, exciting, and seemingly anyone’s meet to win, especially after top-seeded Oklahoma’s shocking loss in the semi-finals. But was it really anyone’s championship to win? How close was the meet in reality?
To determine this, we took our meet predictor and made some tweaks. For our usual pre-meet predictions, we simulate all 96 routines of the meet. Here we entered in each routine’s actual score one at a time, in the order that they came in on the broadcast. Then we simulated only the remaining routines of the meet where the gymnast(s) who already competed were no longer eligible to provide a simulated score. We ran each simulation 10,000 times and determined how likely each team was to win the championship at every moment during the meet.
The results of our simulations are in the chart below. The first point for each team represents its win chances before the meet started and each subsequent point is the new win percentage based on the most recent routine. In the rotation-by-rotation charts, there will always be a win chance for “routine 0”, which represents the win chance after the final routine of the previous rotation.
As you might expect, we found that both high scores and falls can produce large swings in a team’s win chances. But we also discovered that good-but-not-great scores can change the landscape as well. We see several moments where a high 9.8 score actually lowers that team’s chances of winning, if it was uncharacteristically low for that gymnast.
In this article, we’ll be focused on win chances, not necessarily the scores themselves. That means if we refer to a team as “in the lead”, they were the most likely team to win the title at that point of the meet. They may or may not have had the highest score at the time.
Rotation 1 (Florida VT, Utah UB, California BB, LSU FX)
The meet started with the No. 2 LSU Tigers as the favorites to win it all with an almost 60% chance of winning the meet. The No. 3 California Golden Bears were the next most likely champions with a 28% chance of winning, while No. 4 Florida and No. 5Utah both had less than a 10% chance of winning the national title. These win chances stayed pretty consistent through the first half of rotation 1.
The first major shakeup of the championship was KJ Johnson’s uncharacteristic fall on floor. That, coupled with eMjae Frazier’s excellent 9.95 on beam pushed California to be the slight favorites for the first time. This lead was short-lived, however, and LSU became the favorite again after Mya Lauzon scored just a 9.9 on beam. You might not expect a 9.9 to lower a team’s win chances, but Lauzon scored higher than a 9.9 in 11 out of 15 of her beam routines leading up to the championship, so many of our simulations included a higher score in California’s total. Gabby Perea’s missed connection in her beam routine separated the Tigers and the Golden Bears once again, ending the rotation with similar win chances to how it started.
Utah and Florida didn’t enter the conversation much during rotation 1. For most of this rotation, both teams hovered around a 5-10% chance of winning, swapping who the favorite to win third place six different times. Utah separated itself from Florida, however, when Leanne Wong’s vault earned her a 9.8125, her lowest score all season.
Rotation 2 (LSU VT, Florida UB, Utah BB, California FX)
Rotation 2 consisted of a series of routines that gave away leads to other teams. Through the first half of the rotation, each of LSU and California’s routines gave the other team the lead. Aleah Finnegan’s vault gave the edge to California, but then Maddie Williams’s floor gave it right back to LSU. Amari Drayton’s vault and Ella Cesario’s floor both flip-flopped the lead to their opponents as well. This trend ended when Kyen Mayhew fell in her floor routine, which dropped California’s win chances down to only 23%, their lowest so far all meet and below Utah’s for the first time all meet. Utah, however, quickly followed that routine with Abby Paulson’s lowest beam score of the season, a 9.85, giving the edge for second place back to California. The Golden Bears gave their advantage back to Utah when Andi Li scored a counting 9.825 on floor. Utah remained the favorites for second place through the end of the rotation.
With both California and Utah having sub-par rotations, LSU was able to become the strong favorite at the halfway point of the meet, with a 67% chance of winning the title.
Rotation 3 (California VT, LSU UB, Florida BB, Utah FX)
Rotation 3 had only a few pivotal routines to call out, but they each brought us closer to a very exciting meet heading into the final routine. The first two key routines of this rotation were Frazier and Lauzon’s vaults, which scored 9.9375 and 9.95 respectively, two of the highest vault scores of the entire meet. These routines brought California back to being the favorite for second, beginning to separate itself from Utah. Later in the rotation, we saw an unfortunate beam fall from Wong, which was the nail in the coffin for Florida and lowered its win chances to 0%. While, technically, it was still possible for Florida to win if the other three teams failed under pressure in the final rotation, none of the 10,000 simulations we ran produced this scenario. The final key routine of the rotation was Haleigh Bryant’s bars. A 9.875 was not the caliber of routine we were used to from the individual national champion and was lower than 12 out of 15 of her previous bar routines this season. This brought the meet much closer between LSU and California, giving them a 49% and 35% chance, respectively, of winning the title going into the final rotation.
Winning… But Not The Favorites To Win
It’s interesting to find that Utah had the lead in terms of scores at this point in the meet with a 148.5, beating LSU by 0.0375, California by 0.15, and Florida by 0.5375. However, the Utes only had a 15% chance of winning the title. This is because Utah was headed to vault, one of their weaker and lower-scoring events, while LSU and California were both headed to stronger events. The graph below shows the range of scores each team was simulated to get in the final rotation, where the stars represent the actual score each team earned at the meet. It’s clear to see that Utah needed a very strong vault rotation, or some big mistakes from LSU and California to pull off this win, and unfortunately for them, it was not the outcome that occurred.
Rotation 4 (Utah VT, California UB, LSU BB, Florida FX)
Utah’s chance at their first national title since 1995 quickly dropped when Camie Winger fell on her opening vault. Then, when Ella Zirbes also took a big stumble forward on her vault landing, it was over for Utes. Their win chance hovered right around 0% for the remainder of the meet.
For LSU, Sierra Ballard started things off very strong with a season-high 9.95 on beam, but Savannah Schoenherr managed to keep the meet interesting with her sloth-like fall on beam in the number 2 spot. The Tigers didn’t let the mistake shake them, however. They nailed each of their final four beam routines, each one bumping up their chances of winning the title until Finnegan’s 9.95 officially gave LSU their first national title in program history!
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Article by Claire Harmon
