After yesterday’s shocking upsets that knocked out the No. 1 and No. 3 seeds from the national championships, it’s only right to update our simulator for Four on the Floor. LSU and Florida were previously given a combined 40% chance to win the national title, so it’s worth taking another look at each remaining team’s chances according to our model. We re-ran the simulator 10,000 times and added scores from the semifinal into the pool available to the model. We did not change any parameters from our post-regionals run, with later season scores being prioritized over early season, scores from injured athletes being less likely to be chosen, and road scores being more likely to be used than home scores.
Team Results
The table below shows the percentage of model runs in which each team won the national title.
| Team | Percentage of runs |
| No. 2 Oklahoma | 80.52% |
| No. 4 Utah | 9.21% |
| No. 5 UCLA | 8.73% |
| No. 7 Missouri | 1.54% |
Oklahoma was already the simulator’s favorite going into nationals, and the loss of LSU and Florida has increased the Sooners’ chances accordingly. Utah and UCLA again find their chances very close, with Utah given the slight edge this time. This is flip-flopped from the model runs prior to the semifinals, when UCLA had slightly higher chances to make the final and take the title, and this is due to the unfortunate injury to Mika Webster-Longin. We have excluded her scores entirely from today’s model runs but did run it with her included in case the injury isn’t as bad as it looked and she’s able to compete. With her scores included, UCLA again comes out just above Utah, with 9.09% compared to 8.85% for the Utes.
As we saw yesterday, winning a title ultimately comes down to who hits well on the day; what happened earlier in the season doesn’t matter. Our model attempts to quantify how likely it is that each team will live up to its potential, and those numbers favor Oklahoma by a significant amount. If all four teams have a good day, it should be an extremely close and exciting meet.
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Article by Jenna King
