If Men's Nationals Invites Came Out Tomorrow... Part 2
The event tables and some guesses.
If you are interested in the selection process, please refer to the footnote in Part 1.
This is a two part series that asks the question: If Nationals Invites for Men’s events were released tomorrow, what would the sheet look like?
Here we guess the layout of individual event tables and include relays, offering insights into potential March matchups. We also have to deal with the issue of 'cap-hits,' where team-size restrictions force teams to bench healthy, qualified athletes.
What we know we got wrong
First, we created the tables having adjusted for the allowable number of individual swims (three) but not for the team cap (18 athletes total).1 We will make note of places where the cap is a factor.
Second, the NCAA is going to invite 236 swimmers for Men’s events, but we have only 233 athletes listed on the tables (this includes the relay tables below). We will try to determine where those three athletes might get added in and put that in the table notes. But we doubt we will fully anticipate how the selection committee would handle this.
Third, we are not paying enough attention to turnaround time between events.
Fourth, there is going to be some variance introduced by known unknowns and unknown unknowns.2 It is what it is.
The Events
A couple things. James McChesney qualified for an invite in the 500 Free, but he’s qualified in a lot of individual events and he can only swim three. We guessed he would drop out of this one and focus on one of the events where he was more likely to A Final.3
Cap considerations: Also, there are five Emory swimmers in this one event. A couple of those Emory swimmers are clearly going to Nationals, but we think a couple of the others might be excluded because of the team cap. We wince just writing these words.
Matt Giardinelli
Given the Eagles cap issues, we think Matt Giardinelli, a Sophomore from WashU, would get an invite in this event. He is also new to our invite field, so we are now at 234 swimmers total. We also think Nick Scruton, a First-Year at NYU, would be a likely 500 Free invitee, although he is already included in our total headcount because of his likely invite in the 1650.
First surprise of the night is Vineet Ranade from Rose-Hulman, who has a pretty good track record on 200 IM. If he holds on to that spot he will be the only swimmer in the first two events from outside the top dozen teams. This top-dozen thing is real. According to our model there are 247 possible invites in individual events at Nationals, and the top twelve teams will receive 205 of those invites. There are lots of other ways to slice this, like: the top six teams (Emory, Kenyon, Chicago, Denison, NYU, & JHU) will receive far more invites than all the remaining teams combined. You get the idea.
The presence of athletes from TCNJ, Rochester Institute of Technology, St. Mary’s College of Maryland, Ithaca, and Drew makes this event a virtual festival of institutional diversity. At least compared to most of the other events.
The outstanding Peter Meng gets Case Western on the board. CWRU is much improved and still ascending, though they are also in the toughest conference in the division. Otherwise, the table is filled with pretty much who you would expect, although seeing two TCNJ swimmers on the table is a useful reminder of how strong that program has become.
Cap considerations: We think this might be a third event for Denison’s Gavin Jones after Emory suffers another cap hit. We hope no one thinks we are enjoying this discussion of caps. In our model, five Eagles will be cap casualties. If that happens for real in February - and we really hope it does not4 - we consider it a disaster.
Men’s 100 Fly has been nuts the last couple years and we should expect more of the same from Mr. Ssengonzi, Julien Camy and the reigning National Champion Marko Krtinic. This is also the second appearance of a swimmer from the much-improved program at Drew, and a first appearance from a U-Wisconsin school, in the form of Gus Grimstad of Stevens Point.
Jack Hill of Ramapo? His 200 Free time was established on only his second swim in that event. Like, ever. He is from England…where he may have been ranked… top 10 nationally…we aren’t sure how to interpret what we are seeing. So his unfamiliarity with 200 SCY may have more to do with SCY than with anything else.
By and large, more big programs and familiar names. The outstanding John Drumm is the second entrant on the tables from Case Western, and Drew’s Hayden Koh makes his second appearance.
Luke Schwenk makes another appearance for SMCM, and NCAP alum Emil Lasida is now the third CWRU athlete to make one of these tables. This is the only event with 18 invites so it makes sense to add another invite. Plus, the Emory cap-limit resurfaces as an issue here. So we need to add two.
Theo Chen
In our model, MIT’s Theo Chen would now get an invite in 100 Back. Since he was already included in our headcount as a relay swimmer, the number stays at 234 athletes invited.
Jack Hill
We see First-Year Brit Jack Hill getting a third invite here, bringing him to his individual invite max.
Jake Meyer’s wheelhouse, with two of his closest competitors being members of his own team. This season, Garrett Clasen held the 100 Breast lead until the Denison Invitational in early December, and Mr. Clasen is also the National Champion in 200 IM. Anthony Fitzgerald of Wheaton (IL) is the first representative from his program and Owen Miller is now the second Pointer to make the tables. Nathan Ober brings Catholic University their first visit to the invite field.
No surprises here except for the appearance of an Oberlin Yeoman. Their mascot appears to be an irritated albino squirrel, which feels very D3.
Kadin Denner
Our model says we need to add an invite here. The next invite would go to Kadin Denner, a standout Sophomore at UW-Eau Claire. He would be UWEC’s lone representative on the invite tables, bringing our overall total to 235 athletes.
This one goes to twenty because Mr. Wehbe and Mr. Downs have best times that are identical. That is likely to sort itself out in the coming month.
There is a second appearance for standout Michael Kohl from that excellent Trinity program in San Antonio. Jack Hill makes this table as well. Max Cory from Bates is both an actual athlete (with an outstanding 100 Free time) and the personification of a warning that NESCAC starts their season later than everyone else and a rush of NESCAC swimmers on to these tables in the coming month would not be a shock.
Look at the top of that table. This is going to be a battle. Our dark-horse nominee is Alex McCormick, who swam a 1:44.56 at the Denison Invitational, his fastest ever outside of Nationals. Toby Cahnbley is the first Rowan Prof to make the tables.
Also, we are noticing now that David Bajwa would have just swum 100 Free before this event. So, we are dropping him and adding Leo Han from NYU. This is his second individual event, so our total cap stays at 235.
Anthony Fitzgerald is having a really nice year. Impressive.
And we need to do some more cap contingency planning here. We can’t insert Larry Yu from Pomona-Pitzer because he literally5 has six other individual events with an invite time. After that is Emory’s Chris Dieffenthaller, but that is not a likely fit here.
Liam Nelson
Liam Nelson of Denison gets a second individual event invite. He is already included in our head-count so we still have only 235 swimmers invited.
The Relays
We will keep the relays simple with 16 relay teams invited per event.
Not much to say about these, but they do fill out the picture.
We have one more swimmer we could invite and we will sit on it for now.
Over the weekend we will take a look at the competitors in Women’s events.
While it is fairly easy (though not necessarily completely accurate) to suggest how an athlete with five potential invites would choose their three events, it is much more difficult to determine which healthy, eligible athlete does not get to swim at Nationals. There are - in recent history - only three people who ever have to make that decision and their names are Jon Howell, Jess Book, and Gregg Parini. But we will make guesses anyway and see whether those guesses mean an invite for someone not listed on the tables.
We cannot anticipate the exact impact of predictable variables, like late-season injuries. And there are the unknown unknowns, like maybe decision-making dynamics among the selection committee, that introduces variance.
Also, 19 invites for a Men’s event is a lot. This is something that happens when the top swimmers qualify for many invites. The number of invites per event is also the objective thing we are most likely to have gotten totally wrong AND the sort of thing that is easy to remember. So, coming in with a high number like 19 is a big (and possibly ill-advised) gamble on our part.
And there are a lot of ways for us to be wrong about this. Most prominently, any athlete we currently think might be a cap-casualty may have a couple brilliant swims in the coming month and move themselves firmly off the bubble. We want that for every one of these athletes. But we also recognize that this is a zero-sum game. We have 23 Eagles on our board and only 18 get invites. And when this gets real, in about one month, we think the cap will claim a number of Eagles, and we are just waiting to see how many and which ones.
Literally.