Subtext and context
With the women's diving invites settled, the edge goes to NYU
The subtext here, in case you missed it, is that in the lighthearted early days of the season, we shared an intuition—based on precious little analysis. We were looking at where teams finished the previous year, and we calculated how many SRS points they lost to graduating seniors. Then we made a bold prediction. So bold, in fact, that (we figured) no one would actually hold us accountable if it didn’t come true.
It was about the NYU women:
‘By the way, NYU is going to win it all this season.’1
It led to charges of pro-NYU bias. Which was fine. We aren’t biased toward one team or another (except Salisbury and Nebraska Wesleyan), but readers are free to think what they want. SRS simply suggested the NYU women’s team, who finished a close third at nationals, was essentially intact, while all the other top contenders lost some serious SRS contributors.
We liked their chances. We still do.
Diving and decisiveness
In most cases, the team that wins a women's national championship does so by a margin greater than the total points they score in diving. That means, while diving is important, it typically isn't the decisive factor.
Except in 2006.
That year, Emory won the women's national championship by just 10 points over Kenyon. Emory diver Lisa Parton finished eighth in the 1-meter competition, earning 11 points. In 2006, diving was decisive.
Since then, while diving has played an important role in championship races, it has not been the deciding factor.
This year, however...
What the psych sheet said
According to the psych sheet, the top three teams—Kenyon, MIT, and NYU—are separated by just 14 points. That is a margin smaller than the points NYU and MIT can reasonably expect to earn from their divers. Here’s one way to look at the influence those diving points may have on the outcome of the meet.
Monte Carlo simulation, without divers
Without adding in likely diving points, if we run a basic Monte Carlo simulation of the championship outcome 10,000 times, assuming significant variability in performance—a ±30% swing from the psych sheet projections—the results show a fiercely competitive race. Kenyon wins more often than any other team, but the margin is far from overwhelming.
Kenyon – 3,356 wins
MIT – 2,711 wins
NYU – 2,456 wins
Emory – 1,158 wins
Denison – 302 wins
Williams – 17 wins
With divers
But then we added in likely diving points. Again, with diving we don't know what we are talking about, so we are just assigning points based on likely rank ordering. The contributions of their divers—calculated this way—pushes NYU and MIT ahead of Kenyon.
Here is our best estimate based on who was invited and their regional scores in each event. With 10,000 Monte Carlo simulations at ±30% variability for the women's events, the following teams win the simulated 2025 nationals the following number of times:
NYU - 3,589 wins
MIT - 2,980 wins
Kenyon - 2,234 wins
Emory - 925 wins
Denison - 266 wins
Williams - 6 wins
This is just a rudimentary Monte Carlo sim. The limitations are obvious.
And it is worth remembering that those numbers do mean what they say. With this rudimentary model, yes NYU looks like the favorite, but six times out of 10,000, Williams wins the women’s national championship. If that happens, it just means that the really (really) unlikely thing happened. Which…happens. By that token, if Emory, for example, wins, it is not the most likely outcome, but it also won’t be that weird. In fact (hypothetically) they have a half-way decent chance.
Still, going into nationals, no one is in a better spot than NYU.
We won’t go into detail about MIT and Pomona-Pitzer, except to note that MIT finished fifth at Nationals last season. Losing Edenna Chen is a setback, but they are gaining the most valuable transfer in all of Division III. Alex Turvey, who graduated from Pomona-Pitzer last year, has joined the Harvard/MIT M.D.-Ph.D. program. Ms. Turvey will bring her fifth year of eligibility (and her 11.9 SRS points) to MIT, making an already strong squad… absolutely terrifying.
“It led to charges of pro-NYU bias. Which was fine. We aren’t biased toward one team or another”
Exactly what an NYU propagandist would say! I’ve known all about your NYU apologist behavior since 2018 D3, when you forced us to order only New York Style pizza at UAA’s despite the fact we were in an Atlanta strip mall. This blatant and totally real bias must end!
I feel that any discussion of the impact of diving on the results of any swim and dive meet touches on a growing divide in the sport(s?) at the NCAA level. Just in the comments of some of your previous posts, that's been visible, but also in some of the recent articles put out by SwimSwam.
For all intents and purposes, swimming and diving are separate sports, and only share the action of landing in the water. They also have different audiences, and generally different recruiting bases. I have heard many more stories about divers sharing a background in gymnastics or cheer, than coming from competitive swimming.
As our sport at the NCAA level continues to feel the squeeze of change brought by the House verdict and settlement, swimming and diving seem to be growing apart. Maybe the sports have already grown apart, and were only kept under the same umbrella due to administrative reasons, and the change in roster construction has merely revealed that divide, rather than contributed to it. I don't know.
To me, it seems that olympic NCAA sports are facing real, long-lasting change. That's pretty scary. I think rather than letting the fear of that change make swimming and diving more insular and separate, and thus more likely to suffer the consequences of being left behind by universities and conferences, both sports would do well to present a united front.
To loop back around to the actual content of the article, this year's NCAAs will be an incredibly exciting watch. I've always wondered about the level of variability of diving at the championship level. Considering how talented all these athletes are, Is it possible for divers to jump up multiple spots in seeding, and score more points than expected? Generally, in swimming, most of the top seeds carry through roughly where you expect them to, is it the same in diving?