With the NCAA gymnastics postseason getting underway this weekend, we’re sure to hear complaints from gym fans about judging being less strict in the second session of two-session meets. While this does not affect team advancement through the tournament, since the advancing teams are determined within each session rather than combining both sessions, this does have the potential to affect individual qualification to nationals as well as the awarding of national titles to individuals, since scores for individuals are combined across both sessions. Is this rise in scoring a myth or is there actually a noticeable trend? To examine this question we’ve looked at data from the past five completed postseasons.
Methodology
Using Road to Nationals as our source, we collected data from the second round of regionals and the national semifinals, both of which are two-session meets. We used data from 2019, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024, which are the last five seasons to have complete postseasons. Data from full teams and qualified individuals was included. In order to avoid skewing the results, we excluded scores below 9.700, as well as scores from gymnasts with an NQS below 9.700 (or no NQS at all) on the event, competed. With the remaining scores from each meet, we subtracted the gymnast’s NQS from the number scored at the meet. These differences were averaged for each session and the averages between the first and second session of each meet were compared.
Results: Regionals
With 20 regionals to look at during our chosen time frame, we should have enough data to determine any trends that emerge. For the charts below, positive values indicate that there were higher scores (compared to each gymnast’s NQS on the competing event) in the evening session of the regional compared to the afternoon session. The black dot for each year is an average of the four regionals.
Between 2019 and 2024, there were 15 regionals that produced positive values in our chosen calculation method, indicating that there was an upward trend in second-session scores in 75% of the regionals we looked at. The extent of this varies, with the highest value coming from the 2021 Salt Lake City regional (and no, this wasn’t due to home scoring—the home team Utah was in the early session!). The average values for each year were all greater than zero, and there is a general upward trend over time, meaning that the scoring disparity appears to be getting larger.
While the numbers in the chart appear small, it is important to realize that this calculation is per routine, so a 0.01 increase translates to a two-tenth difference in total team score once you apply it to 20 counting routines in a meet.
The majority of these regional competitions had a full team competing in its home arena. In this article, we are not investigating the extent to which favorable home scoring exists, but we recognize it may be a possibility that could skew our calculations, so what do the results look like with the home teams (and individuals) removed completely?
The home teams competed in the early session in 11 out of the 20 regionals we looked at, so it was a pretty even split between the sessions. While some of the values have changed after removing the home teams’ scores, the averages each year are largely the same and the general upward trend remains apparent.
Our motivation for excluding scores below 9.700 was to avoid skewing our calculations with missed routines, but there remains the possibility that there is still some skewing present—for example, if a gymnast with a 9.925 NQS scores only a 9.700, there was likely to be an error in her routine. We can only control this so much when aggregating scores to this extent, and this skewing is likely equally present across early-session and late-session scores so it shouldn’t affect our analysis too much. However, one way of limiting the effects of this is to only look at the scores of the teams that advanced out of each session, since presumably, they had fewer missed routines than the teams that did not advance.
These results are less definitive than the previous sets, with 60% of regionals giving positive values compared to the 75% we originally saw. The averages trend lower before and even have a downward trend over time rather than the previous upward trend.
Results: Nationals
The national semifinals have the same format as the regional semifinals, with advancing teams being determined within each session and individual titles combining scores from both sessions, so we can do the same analysis to see whether scores tend to rise in the second session.
The blue dots in the chart above show the calculation including all competitors, while the red dots only include scores from the teams that advanced from each session. The blue dot is covered by the red dot in 2019, as the values came out to be exactly the same that year. All values in this analysis were in the positive range, a significant finding even though we are dealing with a smaller sample size than the regionals data. There is again a general upward trend over time, with the 2024 values being an especially stark contrast to previous years. It will be interesting to see whether this trend continues in this upcoming postseason.
Discussion
Based on the results we’ve presented, it is difficult to argue with the idea that scores tend to be higher in the second session of two-session postseason meets. There also appears to be an upward trend to this phenomenon over time. While it’s easy to assume that this trend is due to judging being less strict in the later session, there could be other factors at play that affect the gymnasts’ performance. We are simply looking at the numbers to establish whether the trend exists; we are not attempting to determine the reason behind it.
It’s important to note that in each of the years we’ve analyzed, the distribution of teams within the two sessions has been similar, with the highest-seeded team competing in the second session of the meet. However, the distribution of the teams by ranking is fairly equal between the two sessions, so we don’t think this should skew the results. It would be interesting to see how the analysis would turn out if the order of the sessions were reversed, with the highest-seeded team competing in the first session, but that is not the format we have been given! In a change this year, the order of the two national semifinal sessions will be determined by ESPN, so we do have the possibility of the highest-seeded team competing in the afternoon session, but the session order at regionals will remain the same as in past years.
Opportunities for Further Analysis
Another possible way of analyzing this trend is to look at the number of individual qualifiers to nationals that came out of each regional session and the number of individual national champions that came out of each national semifinal. Perhaps we will add a second part to this article in the near future!
We did not include conference championship meets in this analysis because the format is completely different, with the highest-ranked teams most often competing in the final session rather than there being a relatively even distribution of teams across the sessions. We hope to do a separate analysis focusing solely on conference championship meets in the future.
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Article by Jenna King
