Ask us anything...
In which we respond to a few questions we received earlier this season. Also, when it comes to the CSCAA Top 25 poll, we have more questions than answers.
This does not require much set-up. Here are the questions:
Is it too early to call the Emory men’s 4-peat right now?
How did the Emory women surge back into first place?
Which events are strongest?
What is up with the CSCAA Top 25 poll?
‘Is it too early to call the Emory men’s 4-peat right now?’
Yeah, we think it is a little early. No team had a stronger start than the Emory men (except the Emory women).
We close out December with the Denison men holding a narrow lead on the Emory men: Denison is clear of Emory by 3.52 SRS points.
If you are curious: Last season, Emory finished December exactly 5.12 SRS points ahead of Kenyon, 6.79 SRS points ahead of Chicago, and 7.40 SRS points ahead of NYU. Not for nothing, the order of finish at 2024 nationals was Emory, Kenyon, Chicago, NYU.
As always, it pays to recall that SRS is a measure, not an opinion. So if the Emory men have a better January than the Denison men, that will be reflected in SRS.1
‘How did the Emory women surge back into first place?’
This question came in before the post last week. We believe we answered the question there. But we had a few follow-up thoughts on this.
Every season since COVID, there have been first-years who became national champions in women’s events. But the numbers have been diminishing each year.
In 2022, there were three athletes, each winning one event: Caitlin Marshall, Taryn Wisner, and Kristin Cornish.
In 2023, there were two: both Kaley McIntyre and Lily Klinginsmith won two events each.
Last season, Bengisu Caymaz (who also won two events) was the lone first-year national champion.
A trend? We are mindful of the usual caveats: a small sample size and a limited time series. In the short term, random variability swamps everything—doubly so with small samples.
Still, while this may not be predictive or establish a trend, it does mean something. Right now, there is only one swimmer in Division III who has both been a national champion in more than one season and has won at least one event every year she was eligible: Kaley McIntyre. Bengisu Caymaz could join her this year.
New streaks may begin this season: among the top 25 SRS scorers in women’s events, four are first-years, including two in the top five and a third in the top ten. The full table is available in the footnotes.2
‘Which events are strongest?’
The actual question was: So if your SRS measures how good a swim is against the fastest swims ever, why not tell us which events are actually the best right now? You know, the ones where the top swimmers are absolutely crushing the usual fast times?
Doable.3
Women’s 100 Back
The event where the top swims are worth the most SRS points is women’s 100 Back. This is a roll-call of D3 superstars, led by the incomparable Kate Augustyn (MIT), along with 2023 SOY Sophia Verkleeren (Williams), the consistently excellent Megan Jungers (Emory)—one of the top backstrokers in the division for the fifth year in a row—and elite swimmers from NYU (Nicole Ranile), Denison (Jasmine Park) and MIT again (Sydney Smith).
Women’s 200 Breast and 100 Fly
Also among the top events are women’s 200 Breast—paced by last year’s national champion Gabby Wei (Kenyon) and first-year standout Sarah Bernard (MIT)—and 100 Fly. Women’s 100 Fly could not be closer. Albion superstar Hannah Fathman is a top five talent, and is currently the top senior in the division (by total SRS). Close behind her is one more excellent but underrated NYU swimmer, Hope Xayaveth. In third is Emory’s dominant first-year Allison Greeneway. In women’s 100 Fly, Ms. Fathman, Ms. Xayaveth and Ms. Greeneway are separated by 0.04 SRS points.
Men’s 200 Back
For three consecutive seasons, Eric Lundgren of Tufts has been a championship finalist in 200 Back. He is now a senior and leads the division in SRS points for men’s 200 back. He has never been this fast this early in the season. NYU first-year Teddy McQuaid is second in 200 Back SRS points, adding his name to the long list of NYU’s championship-level swimmers. Close behind him is another impressive first-year—Matvey Malinovski of Carnegie Mellon—and his all-everything teammate, Brayden Morford.
Men’s 400 IM
The single most impressive swim by a first-year—in men’s or women’s events—was a 400 IM by Max Nechydyuk (NYU) at the Phoenix Invitational. Also scoring major SRS points in the 400 IM are the 2024 national champion in this event, Crow Thorsen (Emory), Kenyon’s standout D2 transfer Kiril Sidorko, and another impressive first-year, Grant Hu of MIT.
‘What is up with the CSCAA Top 25 poll?’
Basically, this is a composite question. It took various forms and came from several sources.
To what extent should swimming rankings adopt a more sophisticated methodology?
Is this poll predicting something?
Why are they focusing on dual-meet scoring?
The CSCAA is transparent about one important aspect of their Top 25 poll: they are not going to engage with the question most people want answered.
The committee, consisting of Division III coaches, assesses and ranks the nation's top 25 dual meet teams…It's important to note that the poll's objective is not to predict the top finishers in a championship meet format.
So the CSCAA Top 25 is a ranking—based on dual meet scoring—of teams that will, by and large, not swim each other in dual meets.
Not that top 25 teams never swim in dual meets against each other. It happens. Far less often than in invitational and championship meets. But it does happen.
Does the poll do a good job predicting dual meet outcomes?
Yes, mostly. There is the occasional big miss. But we don’t consider that a major flaw. Anything difficult will have a measurable failure rate.
Do dual meet outcomes do a good job predicting order of finish at championship meets?
No, not really.
Kenyon and Denison swim against each other every season. The winner of the dual meet wins the NCACs later the same season about 50% of the time.
Last year was typical in producing discrepant results: the CWRU men’s dual meet victory over CMU compared to their order of finish at UAAs; the NYU vs Williams vs MIT meet where Williams beat NYU in women’s events but finished behind them when they next met at nationals; the CMU quad meet where in men’s events JHU, CMU and Calvin finished 2-3-4, compared to nationals where the order of finish among those teams was 4-3-2; Pomona-Pitzer’s victory over CMS in men’s events in December of 2023, and their second place finish in men’s events to CMS at the SCIAC championships in February 2024.
We would characterize it this way: dual meets, and thus dual meet rankings, are not useless for predicting outcomes at the much more consequential and interesting invitationals and championship meets. But they aren’t great at it, either.
Nihilists, cynics, and the bewildered
Considering that dual meets are less effective than invitationals or championship meets at creating matchups between top teams—and that dual meets don't reliably predict the outcomes teams prioritize most—why does the CSCAA continue to focus their poll on dual meet scoring?
There’s a nihilist view of all this, which we do not share. One NCAA athlete, who competes in another sport, shrugged when we described the current state of the Top 25 poll and said ‘Every college sport has a coaches poll that is wrong. Why should swimming be any different?’
Nor are we convinced by the cynical view that the CSCAA does a dual meet poll because ranked teams are less likely to swim each other in dual meets, so the quality of the actual ranking is rarely tested.
We are not nihilists, nor cynics. We genuinely have no idea why they do it this way.
Ranking teams based on invitational and championship performance, where most ranked competition happens, wouldn’t be harder.
And let’s not be falsely egalitarian—teams outside the top 25 also compete in invitationals and conference meets. There’s no reason a poll based on invitational/conference scoring would be less representative of, or interesting to, those teams.
And if the CSCAA really cared about lower tier teams they would provide national rankings beyond just the top 25 teams. Mid- and lower-tier teams are completely ignored by the CSCAA ranking system; it is not for their sake that the CSCAA uses dual meets scoring in the Top 25 poll.
The upside of being wrong…
An invitational/championship format poll would probably be proved wrong more often—because we would get more real data, as ranked teams compete with greater frequency in invitational/conference meets—but that would be more exciting than embarrassing. In other sports, those sorts of poll-confounding upsets are a primary driver of fan interest.
Besides, the inescapable risk in trying to do anything interesting or different is that you make mistakes. We try things and fail. Maybe we learn something and get better at it. Regardless, it’s better than standing on the sidelines, restricting your focus to largely hypothetical scenarios, declining to weigh-in on the questions people are actually asking.
To be more precise, Emory has their senior meet against Berry in mid-January and we are not really expecting fireworks from that meet. However, they do swim against Division I Georgia on February 1. Last year that was a reasonably fast meet, especially for McKee Thorsen.
Denison squares off against Carnegie Mellon and Calvin in mid-January. Both opponents are top 10 teams, and we think that meet will be intense and fast. We would not be surprised if Denison’s lead grew before the start of conference championship season.
This season’s top 25 by SRS, women’s events.
Here is total SRS per event.
Great analysis and writing style. Has there been a time the women and men from the same school won the NCAA Championship? Notably, there's a mismatch between CSCAA's poll objective and how swim teams and swimmers' utilize that data. It seems the CSCAA should better align with the type of information everyone is seeking which is not pooling of dual meets.