It’s hard to believe that the 2025 season has come to a close! To try to fight the withdrawal, we’ll be reliving NCAA nationals this week routine by routine, looking at every team’s chances of advancing to the final or winning the championship. In this article, we’ll be diving into semifinal one, but be sure to also check out the dives into semifinal two and the national championship.
You’re probably already familiar with our postseason simulator, but if you want a refresher on how that works, check out the methodology here. To determine the chances of advancing throughout the meet, we re-ran the simulation 10,000 times after each routine, in the order that the scores appeared on the broadcast, simulating only the remaining routines of the meet.
The results of our simulations are in the chart below. The first point for each team represents its probability of advancing before the meet started and each subsequent point is the new probability of advancing based on the most recent routine. In the rotation-by-rotation charts, there will always be a probability for “routine 0”, which represents the probability of advancing after the final routine of the previous rotation.
This meet overall looked like a done deal for Oklahoma and Florida. Oklahoma’s chances of advancing never dipped below 92%, and even halfway through the third rotation, Florida still had a 90+% chance of advancing to the championship. But the end of this meet was incredibly exciting, and Missouri advanced against all odds. Hover/click on the points above to see how each routine impacted the outcome and read on to see what we consider the key routines by rotation below.
Rotation 1 (Alabama VT, Oklahoma UB, Florida BB, Missouri FX)
The first rotation went as planned for the top two teams. Uncharacteristically low scores on floor reduced Missouri’s chances of advancing one routine at a time. Those scores, coupled with Selena Harris-Miranda’s 9.95 on beam, brought us to a point where Oklahoma and Florida had a 98% and 94% chance of advancing, respectively.
Rotation 2 (Missouri VT, Alabama UB, Oklahoma BB, Florida FX)
The second rotation brought a moment of intrigue when Lily Pederson unexpectedly had her first fall on beam of the season, bringing Oklahoma’s chances of advancing to their lowest point of the entire meet: 92.9%. Missouri’s chances temporarily spiked, but quickly returned back to just 6% when Hannah Horton sat down her vault on the next routine. Oklahoma’s chances steadily rose through the remainder of the rotation as each subsequent gymnast hit. Finally, when Faith Torrez’s 9.95 came in and allowed the Sooners to drop the fall, their chances of advancing reached 99.7% and never dipped below that mark for the remainder of the meet.
Rotation 3 (Florida VT, Missouri UB, Alabama BB, Oklahoma FX)
Florida’s shaky vault rotation is where the tides started to turn for this meet. Although Danie Ferris tried to salvage the rotation with a 9.9, three scores in the 9.7s, along with Leanne Wong’s season-low 9.8375 dropped Florida’s chances to 74%. Although this was the lowest Florida’s chances had been thus far, and Missouri was ahead by 0.075, the Gators still had a good chance of moving on since their final event, bars, was a very strong event this season.
Rotation 4 (Oklahoma VT, Florida UB, Missouri BB, Alabama FX)
Florida hitting their normal on bars should have been enough for the Gators to advance, but a series of slightly below average scores, coupled with a clutch 9.9125 from Addison Lawrence and a 9.8875 from Olivia Kelly (only 0.0125 below her season high) put Missouri and Florida into almost a dead heat for who could advance. It’s important to note, that while the simulator does not make any assumptions about lineup order, it was very likely to predict that Helen Hu and Riley McCusker would be the remaining competitors due to their lineup frequency this season. Once Hu’s score came in at a nearly perfect 9.9875 and Missouri took the lead, it was almost a done deal for the Tigers. McCusker needed a 9.975 for Florida to advance, which the simulator only gave an 8.6% chance of occurring. Unfortunately for Florida, McCusker took a step on her landing and did not reach that score, securing Missouri its first trip to the national final!
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Article by Claire Harmon
