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 the national final, but be sure to also check out the dives into semifinal one and semifinal two .
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.
With the upsets in the semifinals, it seemed like this was Oklahoma’s title to lose and the data in the chart above confirms that. The Sooner’s chances of winning the title increased steadily across the meet and only dipped slightly in rotation four after the combination of Jordan Chiles’s strong 9.9375 beam routine and Faith Torrez’s below-average 9.85 bars score. After Chae Campbell had a few large wobbles in her beam routine and UCLA was going to count Katelyn Rosen’s 9.725, it was just about a done deal for Oklahoma. If you’re curious to explore more, hover/click on the points above to see how each routine impacted the outcome.
The Race for Runner-Up
Although the national title was nearly a done deal from the start, the race for national runner-up gave a little more intrigue. UCLA and Utah started with almost equal chances, but slowly across the course of the meet, UCLA cemented itself as the second-best team. Once again, you can 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 in the runner-up race by rotation below.
Rotation 1 (Missouri VT, Utah UB, UCLA FX)
There were a few key routines in rotation one that started the separation between UCLA and Utah in the race for runner-up. First was Ashley Glynn’s 9.6875 after a stumble on her bars landing. For UCLA, Chae Campbell and Jordan Chiles’s 9.9+ floor routines were key, and although those scores may not come as a surprise to many, they eliminated any chances of a lower scoring floor rotation for UCLA.
Rotation 2 (UCLA VT, Missouri UB, Utah BB)
Rotation two is where we saw Utah really start to struggle. Amelie Morgan led off with a large break at the hips, which ended up counting after Grace McCallum fell for only the second time this season. Missouri temporarily had better chances of finishing second than Utah, but solid scores in the back half of Utah’s beam lineup helped the Utes retain that edge. Unfortunately for Missouri, by the halfway point of this meet, it was extremely unlikely that it would pass UCLA for the second spot.
Rotation 3 (UCLA UB, Missouri BB, Utah FX)
If Utah wanted to make a comeback, it needed an above-average floor rotation, but its 49.475 was right around average for the Utes, not giving them much of an edge. It momentarily looked like UCLA might open the door after what could have been a great score from Frida Esparza came in lower than expected due to her knees buckling on the dismount. However, as soon as UCLA could drop that score and replace it with Jordan Chiles’s 9.9625, UCLA’s chances hit over 90% for the first time this meet.
Rotation 4 (Utah VT, UCLA BB, Missouri FX)
Neither Utah nor UCLA had a stellar final rotation, but for Utah to pass UCLA it needed a huge vault score paired with some misses from UCLA on beam. Avery Neff tried to keep the hopes alive with her near-perfect 9.975, but a 9.7 from Ashley Glynn and a scary fall from Zoe Johnson not only cemented second place for UCLA, but also dropped Utah all the way to a fourth-place finish behind Missouri.
READ THIS NEXT: Data Deep Dive: Reliving Nationals Semifinal Two
Article by Claire Harmon
UCLA and mizzou were underscored and over penalized in comparison to OU for the same errors. I’m not saying it affected the outcome come but this took me back to the title that Florida should have won a few years ago.