Midseason is all about which teams are solving their problems and which ones aren’t. There were some major breakthroughs this weekend. For the teams that are continuing to be just fine, that’s ceasing to be good enough. Season highs are the expectation now, and if you’re not growing, you’re getting left behind.
Question: How did Utah just do that?
Sure, this was a big home meet against a big rival and the scoring was maybe a little excitable. That doesn’t explain how different this week’s 198.025 was from basically everything else the Utes have done all year.
It wasn’t quite a masterclass: Vault, the savior of a number of meets before now, looked a bit lukewarm. But putting the pieces together on the technically beautiful but apparently tremendously risky bars and beam lineups is huge.
I’m curious how Carly Dockendorf plays things from here. Never changing a lineup again all year now that something finally worked would be defensible. Trying to optimize for ceiling now that there’s a bit of confidence again, replacing routines like the Raposo bars with things they might want to count, is tantalizing. Either way, it finally feels like there’s a future again.
You don’t need a great seed to do well in the postseason. Most of the first half of the season was a bust and that will hurt for the new NQS format, but if Utah can scrape into the top eight and continue to show 198 ability, a higher finish should be doable. Game on.
Bonus Questions:
Is the ACC actually the best conference? The parity among these teams is bananas. They’re driving us nuts in the meet predictions groupchat. The results don’t make any sense week to week. It’s awesome.
Does Alabama have a 198 in the tank? The Tide has proven week after week that it is actually one of the best teams in the country and that its ranking is the furthest thing from a fluke. But to be a successful ranking upstart, and even to hang around the top of the SEC, you have to keep proving it. Surpassing 198 is the next step. With a road stretch coming up, it’ll be tough to do, but all the more impressive if it happens.
Comment: I’m getting ahead of myself, but the nationals bubble is looking pretty tight.
Arkansas, Missouri, Michigan, Stanford, Michigan State, Minnesota… Nos. 7-12 in the national rankings right now, and I just don’t see a lot of space between these teams in terms of quality and consistency.
And that’s putting to one side Utah, which became the fifth team to exceed 198 this weekend and could end up sailing over this cluster and leaving them just one spot to fight for. (Assuming nobody at the top of the rankings wipes out. As much as Georgia is proving itself right now, there’s a postseason question mark there.)
You have to like Missouri for recent postseason success and Stanford for precedent of peaking at the right time. Arkansas… Who knows how real that Metroplex score was? It’s the Razorbacks’ only road 197 of the season, but what a 197. If that ceiling is attainable in front of cameras and the public, that’s quite scary for the field. Michigan State has been less than the sum of its parts all season, which is the sort of problem that can be fixed very rapidly. There’s no fundamental reason that team shouldn’t be great. Michigan has somehow reinvented itself as a plucky upstart this year, figuring out how to optimize a roster that isn’t that different to the one that struggled through 2025. And Minnesota keeps forcing itself back into the conversation, with three consecutive 197+ marks and a couple of big upsets to its name.
The parity in this part of the rankings is great news for us: Competition for the last couple No. 2 seeds to regionals will be fierce down the home stretch of the season, and all four No. 3 seeds should be genuinely terrifying. None of these guys are going to go down easily in the regional finals.
Bonus Comments:
Air Force is absolutely destroying this season. One of those where the record book will be unrecognizable at the end of the year. Is regionals a possibility? I think so.
Finally, Washington. I’ve pestered this poor team a bit much this year because it’s so clear to me that nothing’s actually wrong technically. It’s literally a falling-off-the-equipment problem. Turns out if you don’t fall off the equipment, you score pretty well and fly up the rankings. Love to see it.
Concern: Auburn is failing to thrive.
In a less noisy way than some of this season’s bigger problem teams, Auburn has never quite settled. Sophia Bell’s Achilles tear this week is another big hit for a roster that had so much going for it and has had to settle for limping along.
Some of this is personnel: Kaylee Bluffstone and Adriana Consoli both could have been quite valuable and haven’t been able to compete at all, while stars like Katelyn Jong and Charlotte Booth being restricted to bars (and pretty lukewarm there, too) is very bad news.
Auburn’s season high is still from its first meet. This might be one of those years we write off as true, flukey bad injury luck. It might turn out that the big picture choices this team is making, from recruiting to routine construction, are a little too risky to add up to success right now.
Bonus Concerns:
Oregon State badly needs to figure out life outside of Corvallis. Gill Coliseum has long (and underratedly) been one of the friendlier home environments in gymnastics, but when all of a team’s home scores exceed all of its road scores, it’s not a great situation. Especially when two of those home scores are from January.
Illinois has slid so far over the last couple of years. It’s sad to see, and sadder with a star of the caliber of Chloe Cho. I’m hoping this is a transition year for Josh Nilson, who did such a great job elevating Temple not too long ago. Recruiting shouldn’t be this tough. The facility is admittedly not that hot, but in so many other ways, UIUC should be a pretty attractive destination. And if recruiting doesn’t pick up, the team won’t either.
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Article by Rebecca Scally
