2020 Men’s NCAA Season: How Did Our Top 20 Recruits Perform As Freshmen?

We’ve already done a deep dive into our recruiting archives, looking at how the top 20 recruits from the high school class of 2016 did after four NCAA seasons. Now it’s time to look back at a more recent recruit ranking: the current year’s freshmen, whom we ranked in the spring of 2018, then re-ranked one year later after the close of their high school careers.

Relevant links:

• Top 20 recruits, high school class of 2019 (original rank as of April 2018)
• Top 20 recruits re-rank, high school class of 2019 (ranked on June 2019)

Naturally, this analysis has a far smaller sample size than our reports from the past two days, so it’s much more difficult to read too much into these numbers. Still, it’s useful to look at which first-year NCAA swimmers had the best performances relative to their recruiting ranks.

2020 update: we typically use NCAA scoring to help analyze these recruit rankings. With the 2020 NCAA Championships canceled by coronavirus, we lose out on a pretty valuable data point. Still, we make do with what we’ve got, which is projected NCAA scoring (based on the psych sheet) along with NCAA invites and other accolades from the regular season.

The ranks listed below are from our re-rank last summer – they are not current ranks of NCAA athletes. We also do not rank international athletes as recruits, as it’s hard to predict if and when they’ll come to the U.S., and which class with which to include them.

TOP 20 RANKED RECRUITS

HM=Honorable mention

The hits:

• The top of the class looked primed to score big early. Six ranked recruits projected to score double digits.
• Texas looked to have hits with all four of their ranked recruits. Caspar Corbeau projected to be one of the top three freshman point-scorers. Jake Foster was set to score 10, and didn’t appear to have a full taper yet. Peter Larson and Ethan Harder would have earned NCAA invites, but Texas’s roster cap kept them from being entered. Neither would have projected to score yet, though.
• We were pretty high on Cal’s Jason Louser and his upside in both rankings. He proved us right with a massive Pac-12 showing and projecting for 11 NCAA points.
• Alabama’s Liam Bell looked like a great get – though he’s now entered the transfer portal.

The misses:

• This was supposed to be a massive class for NC State. It’s unclear whether this group just needs a little more time to develop, or whether they were really saving their best stuff for NCAAs with a lot of relay types. Ross Dant looked outstanding, but Noah Bowers, Noah Henderson and Hunter Tapp all missed NCAA invites. They had some smaller drops in at least an event or two, though, and should probably still project as scorers down the road.
• Same for Virginia, which got #3 overall recruit Jack Walker into position for points, but had Jack Wright and Sean Conway not earn an invite. Wright didn’t drop in the 100, but did go from 4:23 to 4:18 in the 500 and had a marginal 200 drop. Conway dropped in all three of his ACC races, but only marginally: from 1:45.7/3:47.3 IM to 1:45.6/3:46.3.

UNRANKED RECRUITS

And of course, we’ll include everyone’s favorite part: which unranked recruits earned NCAA invites and projected to score points this season – both domestic up-and-comers and international pickups.

DOMESTIC:

• Let’s run through the drops: Brooks Curry was 44.5/1:38.8 in free when we did our senior re-ranks. He went 41.8/1:32.4 and won an SEC title as a rookie.
• Jack Hoagland had two teammates make honorable mention as recruits. But his drops from 4:22/16:37 free and 3:49 IM to 4:12/14:35 and 3:40 had him in line to outscore anyone else in his entire recruiting class nationwide.
• That’s not a typo: Kevin Houseman was in three-way tie for 16th in the 100 breast, hence the third of a point.

INTERNATIONAL:

OTHER 2020 FRESHMAN NCAA INVITEES

Here’s a look at the other unranked freshmen to earn 2020 NCAA invites individually: