One more weekend in the regular season! Somewhere between one and three meets left before regionals, depending on whether you’re one of the smart teams who scheduled a double this weekend or whether you’re whichever SEC team is about to get really unlucky! I can’t in good conscience write another “this is where the math gets serious” introduction; I’ve done too many of those in a row, but I’m still thinking a lot about all of the math. I’m thinking about the soft and squishy stuff too, though. Who’s better than the numbers? Who’s potentially a bit worse? And who do I just want to run my mouth about for unrelated reasons? Read on and find out.
Question: Who has the worst score left on their NQS?
Late-stage rankings moves are all about upside. For the uninitiated, the distance between the top score on your NQS and the lowest score you can replace this meet divided by five is the maximum by which you can increase your NQS. That means that having a lower score still hanging around on the NQS makes you mobile, and at this point in the season, that can make all the difference.
Michigan State and Georgia, with only about four-tenths between their best and sixth-best scores this season, are both sitting ducks in the rankings; no matter how well they do, they mathematically can’t move up the rankings at all. LSU, on the other hand, stretched the top end of the scale with a program record but also has one bum (relatively speaking) road score hanging around, which is why the Tigers have the ability to pass Oklahoma for No. 1 now.
This matters particularly at the bubble, where some teams outside the regionals cut have a huge amount of upside. Ball State and U.C. Davis, for example, are both ranked in the 40s right now but have a drop score almost two points below their season highs. It is odd that it’s the worse scores that make all the difference in the final rankings at this point, but it’s an important parameter to remember to monitor.
Bonus Questions:
How is postseason going to treat this Georgia team? Georgia’s gotten the No. 9 ranking with incredible consistency over the last few months. That means not a great deal of ranking mobility in the last couple of weeks before regionals. I also suspect the GymDogs will turn out to have slightly more built-in deductions than their ranking peers. Still, it’s wildly impressive to have scored almost identically so many weeks in a row, and that resilience will be valuable.
Which version of Iowa State is the real one? The first year of the Ashley Miles Greig era in Ames was an absolute revelation. The second has been pretty forgettable so far. Is this a return to form, or just growing pains?
Comment: West Virginia looks to be turning this season around.
Last year was really, really rough for the Mountaineers. This year also started really, really rough. Then Miranda Smith and Jurnee Lane got injured, and you’d be forgiven for thinking it was essentially over at that point. So why is West Virginia now ranked No. 38 with every possibility of jumping into a regionals position this weekend?
The last two meets were brilliant, and critically for NQS, both were road meets. I’m extremely intrigued, but I don’t know where those results came from. Everybody just hit at the same time, which is both the easiest and the hardest way to make your gymnastics team much better.
The Mountaineers remain just outside of regionals qualification, but with two meets this weekend, that’s fixable. The consistency will need to continue, but that’s true for everyone.
Bonus Comments:
Late-season double meet weekends are incredibly useful. Almost brokenly useful. Cal could mathematically be No. 1! Arizona State could get into the top 15! Neither of those things are very likely, and as Alabama proved last weekend, it’s hard to hold your nerve perfectly to maximize the potential of a double, but it doesn’t surprise me that more teams have been scheduling these in recent years because the potential is so tantalizing.
What a week for Missouri! The Tigers have had a lovely sustainable trajectory of improvement this season and are getting ultra-serious at exactly the right time. A program record and first 198-plus score this weekend was a lovely moment and a good reminder of how dangerous they’ll be in the postseason.
Concern: Is Washington seriously going to finish this ranked No. 37?
I don’t blame the Huskies for their struggles this year. The previous coaching staff barely recruited for this year on the assumption that Skylar Killough-Wilhelm would return, the current staff had no time to recruit for the reality that she didn’t, and an already depth-challenged roster then faced a truly brutal series of injuries. Call this one a transition year, it’s fine. I’m honestly really impressed with a lot of the adaptations that have been made, particularly on bars. That event’s coach, Gibran Campos, is himself in his first year in the NCAA, and he’s managed to assemble some acceptable routines by athletes who probably never expected to put on a pair of grips in college. But finishing exactly one spot outside of a home regionals would sting for anybody.
Bonus Concerns:
What is the dynamic in the new WCGNIC meet going to be like? I haven’t gotten a read on this new division, and the previous USAG was kind of my whole thing. The big picture is Texas Woman’s should run away with it, but is anyone interested in challenging me on that? The whole entity made a lot more sense with Lindenwood and the Ivy League teams involved. This will be something very different.
Florida’s scoring means we don’t know how good the Gators actually are, and that goes both ways. This week’s road 198 was relatively convincing and relatively unremarked, partially because of what a lot of this year’s previous 198s have looked like. It’s not impossible that we’ll end up slightly underestimating Florida’s ability to contend with the other teams when things get really serious because we’re used to ignoring the numbers.
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Article by Rebecca Scally
With everyone traveling you would know better than anyone. I attend a lot of ACC meets and the judging seems to be some of the most inconsistent that I have seen. This season has seemed to come off as wrong. I would love to get your opinions on what conferences are the most consistent and inconsistent in the NCAA. Is that something you are working on.