We’re now firmly in midseason, which means we’re preparing for the beginning of NQS rankings. I briefly gaslit myself into thinking my feeling that it’s too soon for that was just due to my poor grasp on the passage of time, but it actually is soon for that: We’re starting a week earlier this year, which I’m not mad about. The beam wasn’t everyone’s friend this weekend, but for the most part, teams are approaching their scoring potential and we’re starting to understand who’s good and what they need to do to get better.
Question: How good is Utah, actually?
I actually can’t tell, which is honestly quite typical of Utah’s last few years but is still confusing. There’s always this sense of unfinishedness to the team, even in the good weeks. It feels like early season jitters, but sometimes it happens at nationals. Getting a good vault out of Grace McCallum this week helped, and Avery Neff’s quick return is promising. (I think we’re being a little dramatic about that whole situation. The tape job isn’t even extreme.)
Another big point in Utah’s favor is that great score at Best of Utah; that’s very nice NQS padding. Beam has been looking pretty strong per usual, and floor has been climbing the last few weeks. Issues with vault landings and short handstands on bars might just be baked into the Utes at this point—we’ve seen those issues for years. We will probably continue seeing them right up to the third-palce finish in Fort Worth. There’s still a possibility for this season to be different, though.
Bonus Questions:
Who will win NQS? We’re expecting the rankings to switch over to NQS this Monday, the 17th, and there are a lot of scenarios for how it’s going to look, especially for the teams with double-meet weekends. There’s going to be an interesting fight for the No. 2 spot, with LSU, Utah, Florida, and UCLA all able to get there. UCLA is one of a group of teams with one much lower score that can be dropped out of their NQS after this weekend. I’m also watching Minnesota for a rankings leap, as well as Illinois, which has a bum road score and a double-meet weekend in which it can replace it.
Can Washington squeak into regionals? I’d mentally written this season off, especially since, as Alisa Mowe kept reminding us at the Oregon State meet on Sunday, there are a grand total of nine Huskies who are healthy enough to do a routine. But this was a fairly productive weekend in which Washington took advantage of some slightly happy judges with UCLA in town and then just the normal high-scoring environment in Corvallis to get its best two scores of the season. February has been better than January, and while the ceiling isn’t too high, the gymnasts who are presently alive are figuring things out.
Comment: I have several unrelated thoughts on Denver.
One is that this season not going very well is not surprising. Whose idea was it to have no succession plan for the best gymnast on your team beyond and, no disrespect to her, one single solitary former three-star recruit who you would go on to put in zero lineups? Denver has loved playing the COVID year game and clearly always planned to bring as much of the class of 2024 back as possible, but inevitably there’s also been a bit of wear and tear on the four who returned over the years. The transition could have been a little bit smoother, and with two great true seniors on top of the fifth-years, 2026 is going to be very interesting. The signing class is definitely talented, but Michigan’s current season is showing us the limitations of the zero-transition-period strategy.
That said, I don’t know why a bunch of people who are historically pretty good at staying on the beam currently aren’t. That’s by no means the only problem, but it’s something that snuck up on me. Bars is consistent as ever, but after one good bars score at the otherwise mediocre Michigan meet in the first week of the season, 9.9-plus scores have been few and far between.
My final thought is that backloading the season with road meets is an interesting strategy. Looking back, it seems like something Denver’s been doing for a while, though not to the extent of this year in which the Pioneers will be unranked for the first week of NQS. I guess the strategy is to establish a strong scoring baseline and then climb the rankings late by having the best meets on the road in March. It seems to work reasonably well. That said, when they wrapped up their big cluster of home meets last season, they already had a 198 on the board, so this is maybe a little different. We’ll see how it works out.
Bonus Comments:
I was kind of into the Blakely-less Florida lineups right up until beam. Overall the Gators won’t be happy with this one—and I do like the Blakelys and hope to see them back sooner rather than later–but that bar lineup with Bui and Arana is the sort of thing that usually only happens in my dreams and I am grateful for it.
The Mountain West is shaping up to be pretty close. The head-to-head standings aren’t: Boise State is undefeated in-conference, which is only fair. But Utah State is only a tenth and change behind in the standings by average, has had some really solid meets, and is the only member to crack 196 so far this year. Even Air Force has looked dangerous, though it needs to prove it on the road. This has the makings of a fun conference championship.
Concern: Oklahoma’s going to need to figure some things out.
I’ve given the Sooners a lot of grace for the lineup choices this year. I figured that the five all-arounder thing was an experiment KJ would eventually glean the necessary data from and then move on. I wasn’t going to judge her when I also went into this season figuring Addison Fatta should be in about two lineups but with absolutely no idea which lineups they should be.
Six weeks in, Fatta is now 2-17 on her career against other Oklahoma all-arounders and has the lowest average of the weekly lineup contributors on every event but beam (where she’s second to Keira Wells, a routine I am truly sad to say probably should also be replaced). I’m just confused about the fact that we haven’t tried anything else yet. I’m assuming the story is that she literally never falls in practice, but there are other virtues in the world and other routines on the roster. I’d love to see more Kelsey Slade, for one; She’s a stick machine in training clips, and I’m interested to know what she can do with a few weeks in a lineup to figure things out. Danielle Sievers leg events would also be really useful once she’s rehabbed enough.
While Oklahoma is still clearly the best team in the country and shouldn’t lose too much sleep over high scores yet, it is going to come up increasingly frequently that this team hasn’t scored a 198 while LSU and Florida have, and that no Sooners have 10.0s yet this season. Jordan Bowers and Faith Torrez are doing their jobs, and while I’ve complained about Audrey Davis’ leg events in the past, I can’t wish her out of those lineups right now given the available options. (I know she did sit out vault this week, but that strikes me as an in-the-moment decision that won’t have major consequences in the future.) However, something’s going to have to change in the mid-lineup routines for Oklahoma to continue to dominate this season as other teams improve, and facing LSU in the PMAC is an alarming prospect at the best of times. The Sooners can’t lose the No. 1 ranking this week, but whether it’s lineup changes or just consistency, something’s going to need to improve to keep them ahead of the pack as the season goes on.
Bonus Concerns:
This might not be Ohio State’s year. I had high hopes for this season, but in the absence of Payton Harris, there’s a lot of pressure on a lot of young routines—and the result has been pretty erratic. If Harris isn’t able to come back this year (I don’t know the details of her injury, but redshirting and buying another year of her leadership in the future should be pretty tantalizing for the Buckeyes), this probably won’t be a year Ohio State makes a big impact at regionals. Lots of the freshman routines are very good, though, and there’s another terrific signing class lined up, so my concerns don’t extend to the long term.
This isn’t the best year for the MAC. We’ve had lots of fun with MAC teams in the past few years, with a handful of them always involved in the regionals bubble and a few pushing higher. This year isn’t looking quite as strong. Ball State is currently inside the top 36 but might be vulnerable to teams with more upside as NQS rankings progress. Kent State has fallen back to earth after a remarkable 2024, and Western Michigan, one of the great stories of the 2023 season, faces a tough rebuild after graduating a lot of the routines from that breakout roster. Central Michigan, stacked as usual, was a winner on the transfer market this offseason but struggled through January. The Chippewas are looking better now, but it’ll take a little while for those early 193s to fall off their NQS, so we can revisit those prospects later on.
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Article by Rebecca Scally
